University of Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
1740
Red and blue were officially adopted as the colors of the University of Pennsylvania in 1874, having been used for many years previously. Why these colors were chosen is unknown. One apocryphal story says that George Washington was wearing a blue coat with red trim on a visit he made to campus to receive an honorary degree. These colors then became the college colors.
Another apocryphal story states that at a track meet in 1874 the Pennsylvania team captain was asked about the colors of his college and he replied that Pennsylvania used the colors of the teams they beat: crimson (Harvard) and dark blue (Yale).
More likely, however, the colors were borrowed from the coats of arms for one of the founders of the university, Benjamin Franklin (red), and the founder of the state, William Penn (blue). But no one really knows how or when the colors were chosen.
The shades of each color have varied over the years but were consistently (if vaguely) described in most contemporary sources like the World Almanac as simply “red and blue”. The blue is typically dark, for reasons described below.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): red/blue (1895-1935)
In November 1895, the University of Pennsylvania became one of the first institutions to adopt the new Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume. Pennsylvania’s Board of Trustees decided that the university’s hood lining should be of “red and blue silk, arranged in the form of a chevron” after noting “the effect of the blue chevron on a red ground as showing much better in the evening than red on blue as the blue will look almost black at night.”
This is the first known description of an American academic hood to use a chevron to divide the two colors in the hood’s lining – the 1895 Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume had not defined the heraldic devices that could be used to divide the hood lining colors when a school had more than one official color.
Pennsylvania’s use of a chevron was probably a nod to its coat of arms, and during this early period of the Code the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) is known to have considered the aesthetic design of the hood lining to be roughly equivalent to an upside-down shield.
The IBAC initially recorded Pennsylvania’s hood lining assignment using the same description (red with a blue chevron), but by the middle of the 1920s, the Bureau had begun to describe the colors as cardinal and navy blue. Perhaps this is because on 17 May 1910, the University of Pennsylvania had more precisely defined the school colors as being the same shades of red and blue used in the United States flag. These colors in the US flag conform to cardinal or crimson and navy blue, which are here defined as medium red and dark blue.
