University of Michigan – Ann Arbor
Michigan
1817
Until his death in 1921, Gardner Cotrell Leonard was the Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) and a partner in the firm of Cotrell & Leonard, an academic costume manufacturer and the depository for the records of the IBAC. If one assumes that a college or university was assigned a hood lining pattern by the IBAC when academic costume was ordered from Cotrell & Leonard, client lists for Cotrell & Leonard can help one estimate the approximate date that lining pattern was approved by the IBAC.
The University of Michigan appeared in a Cotrell & Leonard advertisement in the 1896 The Comet yearbook of Vanderbilt University, and then in three 1897 sources: the Bowdoin Bugle yearbook, The College Year-Book and Athletic Record, and the “Ole Miss” of The University of Mississippi yearbook. Also, a reporter covering commencement ceremonies at the University of Chicago for the Indianapolis News (9 July 1896) mentioned the University of Michigan as one of a number of colleges and universities that used academic costume. All of this suggests an IBAC hood assignment for the university in 1895 or 1896.
None of these sources described the colors or heraldic pattern of Michigan’s hood lining, but the university’s hood was cited in the 27 July 1902 edition of The Argus, an Albany NY newspaper, which contained a list of IBAC hood lining patterns that had been assigned to some of the more prestigious colleges and universities of the time. Here Michigan’s hood lining was described as “maize” with a blue chevron. “Maize” is how the IBAC tended to describe a golden yellow or light orange color (whereas “lemon” is how the Bureau described a bright yellow color). The IBAC had more precisely defined the shade of Michigan’s blue as “azure blue” by 1918 and “Presbyterian blue” (true blue) by the mid 1920s.
University of Michigan students adopted “maize” and “azure blue” as the college colors in 1867. Before 1867, “blue” had been the only college color.
The shades of maize and azure blue were originally a golden yellow and sky blue. However, in 1912 the university officially confirmed “maize” as being an intense, golden yellow, but redefined “azure” as being a dark blue like Prussian blue, cobalt, or ultramarine, even though these are not the traditional definitions of azure blue. For more information about this see the University of Michigan Bulletin, Vol.16, No.13, 7 January 1987 (page 2, inside front cover).
The World Almanac continued to cite Michigan’s colors as maize and either blue or azure blue into the 1930s, an encyclopedia of college colors from 1949 described Michigan colors as maize and azure blue, and non-IBAC hood lists from the 1960s and early 1970s also described the colors as being maize and azure blue.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): maize/blue (1895-1902); yellow/blue (1904); maize/blue (1906-1908); yellow/blue (1909-1910); maize/blue (1911); maize/azure (1912-1916); maize/blue (1917-1918); maize/azure (1923-1931); maize/blue (1934-1935)
Apparently the IBAC never revised the blue color of Michigan’s chevron to conform to the university’s 1912 directive specifying a dark blue. Here the original IBAC assignment from c.1897 with the university’s traditional shades of maize and azure blue has been maintained.