During the first half of the 20^th century, the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) kept a list of the school colors of various colleges and universities and recorded this information as generic hood lining descriptions in the Bureau’s files, usually as a standard “chevron pattern” hood lining (e.g., “crimson with a white chevron”, “yellow with a green chevron”, “dark blue with a gold chevron”, etc.). These generic descriptions are responsible for the majority of the duplicate hood linings that appear in the published IBAC lists from 1927 and 1948. If a school contacted the Intercollegiate Bureau to request an official hood lining pattern and sent the Bureau color samples so that the precise shades of the school’s colors could be ascertained, the Bureau would assign a unique lining pattern to the school, which would replace the generic description in the IBAC record for that college or university.

Sometimes a school would independently adopt a hood lining without authorization from the Intercollegiate Bureau. In these cases the IBAC would add this information to its files, sometimes altering the pattern slightly to avoid duplicating a hood lining the Bureau had already officially approved and sometimes letting the duplication stand. This situation became more common in the 1950s and 1960s as the influence of the Intercollegiate Bureau began to wane. What this means is that today it is difficult to know whether a new hood lining for a particular college that appears in an IBAC list from the 1960s or 1970s had been officially authorized by the Bureau or if the college had independently designed its hood lining and the Bureau simply transcribed that information from another source into the IBAC records.

Columbia University and the University of Portland must have used a “generic” hood lining pattern not officially authorized by the Bureau during the first half of the 20^th century, because neither university appeared in IBAC lists from 1927 or 1948. The first record of Portland’s lining is in a compilation of hood lining information published by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962), which described the university’s hood lining as purple with a white chevron, a duplication of the lining the IBAC had assigned Amherst College in 1895 or 1896 and Mount Union College prior to 1927. This description was transcribed into Intercollegiate Bureau lists in 1969 and 1972 without change.

To avoid duplicating Amherst’s or Mount Union’s patterns, here Portland has been reassigned a white hood lining with two royal purple bars. This echoes the appearance of the university’s coat of arms, which is a white shield with two wavy bars across its base.