Yeshiva University
New York
1886
How Yeshiva University’s blue and white colors were chosen is not known at this time. Originally the university used an azure blue shade like the blue shown above, but today Yeshiva defines its blue as “Yeshiva blue”, a medium blue color.
The Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) must have assigned a hood lining to Yeshiva University in the late 1940s or 1950s. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the university’s hood lining as being a single color of “sky blue”, an azure shade of blue. A 1969 IBAC description was identical, but a 1972 list from the Bureau defined the color as “pale blue”, a light blue. Unfortunately, this meant that Yeshiva’s hood lining was easily confused with the bright blue lining assigned to Mount Holyoke College or the light blue lining assigned to the University of Maine.
By 2000, long after the Intercollegiate Bureau had stopped adjudicating these matters, a University of the State of New York brochure described Yeshiva’s hood as “sky blue” (azure blue) with a white chevron, a lining pattern not used by any other college or university in the United States. Unfortunately, this duplicated the hood lining the Bureau had earlier assigned to St. Peter’s University in New Jersey. So to avoid this problem, the blue and white colors in Yeshiva’s hood have been interchanged, and the azure blue chevron has been doubled. This design allows Yeshiva University’s hood lining to echo the striped patterns found on a tallit.