Xavier University
Ohio
1831
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): blue/white (1934-1935)
Xavier University must have sent the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) color samples that were blue and white, which is the most popular color combination among American colleges and universities. To avoid duplicating the hood linings of Pennsylvania State University (navy blue with a white chevron) or Middlebury College (Yale blue with a white chevron), the IBAC must have chosen to modify the shade of blue for Xavier’s hood, because academic hood lining lists from 1927 and 1948 described the university as having a hood lined turquoise blue with a white chevron.
This must have been unacceptable to Xavier, because the IBAC reassigned the university a new hood lining pattern in the late 1940s or 1950s: a list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described Xavier’s hood lining as navy blue with two white chevrons and a 1972 IBAC list said that the hood was blue with two white chevrons. Unfortunately this was a duplication of the hood the Bureau had assigned the University of Connecticut (Yale blue with two white chevrons) prior to 1927.
The blue and silver colors of Xavier University were taken from the vertical blue and silver stripes on the university’s seal, but it is not known when they were chosen as the official school colors of the university. In actual practice, the university’s silver is often depicted as white, which is why Xavier’s colors are sometimes said to be blue and white. The shade of blue is dark, like a navy blue.
To avoid these problems, here Xavier has been reassigned a hood lining that uses the heraldry of the university’s original Intercollegiate Bureau assignment (a single chevron) with the university’s correct colors (dark blue and silver).