University Shield
The University Shield is a symbol associated with Columbia that debuted in 1949. The shield is technically not a "coat of arms", and the University does not in fact have one.[2] There are very few official uses of the shield these days except on bookstore merchandise, and the podium used for public events like Commencement.[3][4] The shield had previously been used by the Law School, and appeared on some Soccer team uniforms, among other uses. Its use is technically regulated by the Secretary of the University.[5] For reasons that are unclear, the University has recently decided to adopt as an "official" version of the shield a that leaves little of the original design unchanged.[6]
Contents
History
Not counting modern variations on the King's Crown, the shield is the most recent symbol adopted by the University. Columbia officials unveiled the new symbol on February 10, 1949. It was designed by Milton Halsey Thomas, then curator of Columbiana, Phillip M. Hayden, then Secretary of the University, and Harold H. Booth of Trenton N.J., a specialist in heraldry.[7]
As adopted by the trustees in 1949, the design consists of a blue shield, a white chevron, and three gold crowns. Heraldically it's described as "Azure (blue), Chevron Argent (silver), Three Crowns Or (gold)." The blue and white colors were drawn from the traditional school colors (which in turn were drawn respectively from the Philolexian and the Peithologian Societies.) The shield-with-chevron design was a nod to the coat-of-arms of Samuel Johnson, and the crowns an allusion to the original Crown of King's College.[8] An optional ribbon (sometimes blue in color) below the shield bears the school motto.
In some older illustrations of the shield, a lions head in profile (a "crest") facing left with tongue stuck out is above the shield on a torse. This is another nod to the Johnson family coat-of-arms, which had three such lions heads (instead of crowns) on its shield. The GS shield incorporates one of these lions heads onto its shield design, and an original sketch for the GS shield copies the lion from the Johnson coat directly. A potential shield for SEAS replaces the lower crown on the shield with crossed hammers.[9].
A similarity to the Oxford shield, with its three crowns, is probably coincidental. Interestingly, the second President of King's College, Myles Cooper, was an Oxford-educated priest who envisioned King's College as the first university in North America with the other colonial colleges being placed under its aegis in the mold of Oxford and Cambridge and their constituent colleges. But the shield was conceived long after King's College was a memory, and the design was largely based on the Johnson coat-of-arms, which makes it difficult to determine what, if any, inspiration was taken from old Oxford.
Designs
The design of the shield has evolved in its 60 year history, although it is difficult to establish a clear timeline of changes.[10] At some unknown time subsequent the introduction of the original design, a modified version featuring a slightly more tapered shield, curlier scroll, and slightly exaggerated crowns with a lion's head crest atop a torse above the shield appeared and at the very least saw heavy usage in yearbooks starting in the 1960s at the latest. Later, a new version of the original design came into use where the crowns on the shield were changed from their original 'in-relief' design to the first generation of the "modern" King's Crown. Representations of this version are extremely rare (one example is on the transom window above the entrance to Miller Theatre on Broadway.) The next version of the shield was effectively the same except the crown had once again been changed, this time to the second version of the modern crown design (flattened outter half-arches of the crown rather than with 'bumps' for ornamentation). In 1988 the University registered this design as a trademark with the USPTO.[11] An alternative version of this design is missing the shadowing on the scroll below the shield. Things appear to have bumped along until the early 2000s, when a variety of shield versions featuring the two current official university crown designs began appearing on bookstore merchandise. This development appears to have been ratified in Columbia's Visual Identity guide, which adopted as the "official" design a version of the shield with white versions of the modern "official" King's Crown design, a straightened out ribbon and text on a smooth (as opposed to curly) curve below the shield, and a royal blue background with Columbia blue chevron.
Use
One of the shield's purposes was to serve as a loosely regulated but official ornamental symbol of the school, since the University Seal, Columbia's oldest symbol, was and still is reserved for purposes of symbolic legal authentication. An informative leaflet states that "The design of the shield is the copyrighted property of the University, and while general permission to reproduce it is freely given, any debasement or undignified use of it may result in such permission being rescinded. It may be used as a decoration without special permission by graduates and members of the University, and may be reproduced in proper form on stationary, and on jewelry and pottery."[12]
Today the shield is sparingly used even in its officially sanctioned purpose as the "official unofficial symbol" of the school, having been largely superseded by the King's Crown. In fact, the University's Visual Identity guide discourages its use, recommending the use of the crown instead[6]. While it has regained some popularity on the bookstore merchandise, there is little consistency in design usage, with the new "official" design as well as the older trademarked design (and a number of variations of uncertain origins on both) appearing interchangeably, while use of the original design is a rare.
Gallery
B&W version of the shield design that the University registered as a trademark.
The alternative version of the trademarked design without shadows on the scroll.
Shield design with lions head crest inside 1963 yearbook.[13]
Shield design with lions head crest embedded in a yearbook cover from the 1980s.
A slightly erroneously colored version of the original design that for years was the JPG file of choice for amateur graphic designers on campus.[14]
An unofficial rendition of the original University Shield.[15]
The School of General Studies Shield. It appears to take some cues from the tapered shield design, although this version is incorrectly colored.<ref>The GS Shield is supposed to have the colors reversed with a silver shield with a blue chevron, described in heraldric terms as "Argent, a chevron azure between a king's crown proper, an owl, and a lion's head" School of General Studies Bulletin of Inofrmation, 1954
Early version of the GS Shield. The lions head design is copied directly from the Johnson family coat-of-arms in this version.
A sketch of a potential SEAS shield from the university archives.
One of many sketches of an early shield design from the university archives.
An undated stylized presentation of the shield-with-lions-head design from the university archives.
An alternative layout appearing on bookstore merchandise featuring outsized crowns.
The CUMB Logo.
Shield on the podium. An increasingly rare occurrence of the original design.
The University of Oxford Shield.
References
- ↑ This is a photo of a card that I imagine was used for graphic design, type-setting, etc., in the pre-computer era. There's a stack of these in the University Shield subject file in the university archives.
- ↑ Some years ago, a group of alumni donated an unofficial "coat of arms" centered on the shield design for the University Club of Chicago to display in its Cathedral Hall, which is decorated with coats from various schools.
- ↑ The podium featuring the shield disappeared from public use between roughly 2004-2007 before reappearing once again.
- ↑ In fact, the University's visual identity guide recommends never using the shield to symbolically identify the school, instead directing graphic designers to use the modern King's Crown
- ↑ http://www.columbia.edu/cu/secretary/docs/contact/index.html
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Pg. 2, blue290 A Practical Guide to Columbia’s Standards of Visual Identity (May 2009)
- ↑ New York Herald Tribune, 11 Feb. 1949
- ↑ What the designers of the first shield termed the "Johnson family coat of arms" was actually a design incorporated into a bookplate for the Johnson family library, not really a coat-of-arms at all. It may in fact have been their coat, but the bookplate was what served as the designers' inspiration.
- ↑ Illustrated card in Columbia University Archives, Historical Subject Files, Series XXI: Symbols, Box 255, Folder 5. A number of early sketches of designs, possibly executed by Milton Thomas are also in this folder.
- ↑ The chronology in this section is based on a series of inferences. It's assumed that a) the King's Crown grew simpler over time, and that the Shield was changed in the same order as the crowns.
- ↑ Serial No. 73731782 Reg. No. 1530172
- ↑ Columbia Archives, Historical Subject Files, Series XXi: Symbols, Box 255, Folder 2 (second set of sheets).
- ↑ This is a picture taken from an inside section divider page of the 1963 yearbook. It's a really nice design and I wish I had a scan of it. It appears that design was somewhat prevalent among student groups of the 60s through 80s based on its yearbooks usage.
- ↑ Likely due to the lack of centrally developed visual identity guidelines, various divisions and offices probably designed flyers, signs, etc. using whatever JPG files they had lying around- i.e., this one. You can still see this design around campus on printed out stuff, but with decreasing frequency.
- ↑ This is not an official rendition, but a scan of a black and white version of the colored card mentioned previously colored with photoshop. I did this to make a better graphic than the low-res erroneously colored one for this article in an early version. Among other things I failed to properly color the ribbon blue.
