University of South Dakota
South Dakota
1862
The students of the University of South Dakota chose vermilion as their school color because the university is located on the Vermilion River in Vermilion, SD, but the adoption date is unknown. After it became popular for colleges and universities to have two school colors, especially for athletic uniforms, silver was briefly added as a second color to vermillion in the early 1910s, but this was replaced by white later in that decade. Silver and white are heraldically identical.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): vermillion (1895-1914); red/silver (1915); vermillion/silver (1916); vermillion/white (1917-1918); vermillion or scarlet (1923-1931); vermillion/white (1934-1935)
Colleges and universities that had only a single school color were problematic for the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) because there were many that shared the same or similar shades of a color, without a second color that could be used to create a heraldic pattern in the hood that would make it unique to that school.
The University of South Dakota was one example of this problem. It first appeared in an IBAC list from 1927 where it was described as having a hood lining with the single color of bright red. This suggests an Intercollegiate Bureau registration between 1895 and c.1914, before the university added first silver and then white as a secondary color. Unfortunately, the bright red hood lining the IBAC assigned to South Dakota was too similar to the single color hood linings the IBAC assigned to Bard College, Berkeley Divinity School (now part of Yale University and uses that institution’s hood), and Rutgers. To distinguish South Dakota’s hood lining from these others, white has been added to the lining above the vermilion color, with the two colors divided per chevron.