Thomas Jefferson University
Pennsylvania
1824
The only historical sources for the college colors of Thomas Jefferson Medical College are the 1896 edition of the Living Church Quarterly (1895), where they are listed as blue and black, and various academic costume lists, which describe the colors as black and either sky blue, baby blue, or light blue. The c.1907 lithograph to the right also depicts the college’s colors as black and a light shade of blue.
The Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) assigned a hood for Thomas Jefferson Medical College in 1896, as an editorial in volume 23 (number 4) of The Tuftonian (January 1897) states that the Code “is now recognized and in use by Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, University of the City of New York, Lafayette, Catholic University of America, University of Chicago, Williams, Dartmouth, Union, Bellevue Medical, Jefferson Medical, Rush Medical, and in part by Harvard.” No IBAC description of Jefferson’s hood lining exists until a c.1912 list where it was stated to have a black lining with a sky blue chevron. Within ten years the assignment had been revised to a black lining with a double width (7 inch wide) sky blue chevron, apparently because the Intercollegiate Bureau had inadvertently assigned an identical hood lining pattern to Livingstone College in North Carolina, which had adopted the same colors in 1910.
The “wide chevron” device was not ideal – when the hood was worn, the color above the wide chevron was often obscured, which caused the hood lining pattern to appear to be divided per chevron. So by the late 1960s the IBAC was describing Jefferson as again (c.1912) having a black hood lining with a regular-width light blue chevron, the colors of Livingstone having been rearranged to avoid the duplication.