Webb Institute of Naval Architecture
New York
1889
Detailed historical information about the navy blue and white colors of Webb Institute of Naval Architecture is not available at this time.
To avoid assigning duplicate hood linings to colleges and universities that used the same school colors, the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) used different types of heraldic patterns to divide the two or more colors in an academic hood. One of the heraldic divisions the Bureau employed was a “zone” of color, which is how the IBAC described a horizontal bar.
Webb Institute of Naval Architecture did not appear in early IBAC lists from 1927 or 1948, so the IBAC might not have assigned the college a hood lining until the late 1940s or 1950s. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the institute’s hood lining as medium blue with a white bar, which is strange because Webb’s blue is a dark blue shade (navy blue). A 1972 list by the Intercollegiate Bureau correctly stated that the institute’s hood was Yale blue and white (“Yale blue” was one of the ways the Intercollegiate Bureau described dark blue), but erroneously described the white bar as a chevron. This would have made Webb’s hood lining identical to the hood lining the Bureau had assigned Middlebury College (Yale blue with a white chevron) and Pennsylvania State University (navy blue with a white chevron).
Even so, the single bar of Webb Institute’s hood is problematic because the IBAC overlooked the fact that it had already assigned Lebanon Valley College a Yale blue hood lining with a white “zone” around 1912. This mistake is easily rectified: Webb Institute has been reassigned two white bars, each approximately 1½ to two inches in width, placed about one inch apart so that the navy blue lining shows between them.