

As a result, between 18 the Bureau would approve a total of 34 Faculty colors.
#Faculty color war professional
This happened with increasing frequency in the early 1900s as land grant colleges and universities began to create new Schools and Colleges with professional and technical degree programs, each with a unique degree title that included the name of the profession or specialization: Bachelor of Physical Education, Master of Nursing, Master of Forestry, Doctor of Optometry, and so on.

Leonard’s Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume with the responsibility of authorizing further Faculty colors that might be added to the Code. The Intercollegiate Commission entrusted Mr. Leonard wrote that the academic hood as envisioned by the 1895 Intercollegiate Commission was “a plain badge of the degree, be it Bachelor, Master or Doctor of the department of learning, be it Arts, Philosophy, Law, Theology or other”. He was also the president of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume, an organization Leonard created in 1887 to collect information about academic regalia and promote its use in America. Leonard was head of the academic costume department at Cotrell & Leonard, his family’s clothing store in Albany, New York. Rood was a Columbia University professor of Physics who specialized in light, chromatics, and photography, and whose color theories had deeply influenced the French Neo-Impressionists like Georges Seurat. Gardner Cotrell Leonard acted as advisors to the commissioners on this matter. The commissioners decided that the style of gown and length and style of hood would communicate the level of the degree, while the color of the velvet edging on the hood would communicate the Faculty of the degree, as would the velvet facings and sleeve bars on the doctoral gown if black was not used. The members of the 1895 Intercollegiate Commission of Academic Costume wanted “the cap and gown and hood the degree of the wearer and the faculty under which it was obtained” so that an observer could look at a person’s cap, gown, and hood and understand that the graduate had earned, for instance, a Bachelor of Arts degree, or a Master of Science degree, or a Doctor of Medicine degree. But in a “tagged” degree the major subject is added to create a trinomial degree title on the diploma.ĭEGREE NOMENCLATURE FOR A “TAGGED” DEGREE Most degree titles do not include the major subject of the degree on the diploma this information is found in the student’s transcript. This binomial nomenclature is used on the diploma the student receives when he or she graduates. At a minimum there is always the degree level (bachelor, master, or doctor) and the degree “Faculty”. A graduate of one of these universities would be granted a degree title indicating his affiliation with the Faculty that conferred the degree and his mastery of that pedagogical subject, as in “Doctor of Theology”, or “Master of Arts”.Īcademic degrees in the United States use a binomial or trinomial nomenclature. The association with an undergraduate or graduate Faculty and a particular color differed among the universities in Europe, but some common “Faculty color” choices included black or white for Theology blue for Arts/Philosophy and scarlet for Canon Law. Today this historical meaning of the term “Faculty” is most closely synonymous to what we would call a “School” or “College”, not to the professors within the collegium. “Faculty” was the term that originally referred to the undergraduate or graduate academic collegium that determined the requirements for the degree and whether those requirements had been met. By the 15 th century it was common for professors to wear a particular color to show their affiliation with the medieval “lower” Faculty of Arts (the Liberal Arts, sometimes called the Faculty of Philosophy) or with one of the “higher” Faculties of Canon Law, Civil Law, Medicine, or Theology.
