Gardner Cotrell Leonard was the Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) and also a partner at Cotrell & Leonard, one of the major manufacturing firms for academic dress in the United States. Because the relationship between the IBAC and Cotrell & Leonard was tight (contemporary materials described Cotrell & Leonard as the “depository” for the IBAC), it is likely that a school was assigned an academic hood lining pattern by the IBAC when that school made a purchase order for academic costume from Cotrell & Leonard. If this is correct, Cotrell & Leonard advertisements from the turn of the century roughly indicate the year the hood lining pattern of a particular college or university was first registered by the Intercollegiate Bureau.

A reporter covering commencement ceremonies at the University of Chicago for the Indianapolis News (9 July 1896) mentioned the University of Wisconsin as one of a number of colleges and universities that used academic costume. Wisconsin appeared in Cotrell & Leonard advertisements in the 1896 edition of The Comet yearbook of Vanderbilt University, the second volume of a photographic album entitled Souvenir of the University of Michigan (1896), and in the 1897 “Ole Miss” of The University of Mississippi yearbook, all of which suggest an IBAC registration date in 1895 or 1896. None of these advertisements described Wisconsin’s hood.

The first full description of the university’s hood lining can be found in a 1918 IBAC list, where it was described as cardinal. In this list, Stanford University was also cited as having a cardinal hood lining. The Bureau had to duplicate the hood linings of Wisconsin and Stanford because both institutions used only one school color. This duplication is no longer a problem because Stanford adopted unique academic costume that does not follow the Intercollegiate Code in 1977.

Do doubt as a way to obscure the fact that both institutions were using the same hood, by 1927 the IBAC began to describe Wisconsin’s hood lining as “bright red”, which normally indicated a scarlet shade. Perhaps by that point Wisconsin was defining its “cardinal” as a brighter red than the darker shade typically associated with cardinal. But this revision was also problematic, because the Intercollegiate Bureau had already assigned Wells College a hood lined scarlet, even though its school color was cardinal like Wisconsin. At any rate, by 1969 the IBAC had returned to a (correct) description of Wisconsin’s hood lining as being a cardinal shade.