The tradition of school colors appears to date back to 1836 England, when the University of Cambridge outfitted themselves in “Cambridge blue” for a boat race against the University of Oxford. In the ensuing years, U.S. students began adopting their own school hues too, and in 1867, a committee of U-M students declared “azure blue” and “maize” the university’s colors.
Blue had been an unofficial color of U-M since the school’s founding, and by the mid-1800s, diplomas were adorned with blue ribbons. Maize was chosen by the students because it provided a nice contrast to the blue.
What quickly became a problem, however, was the fact that the committee provided no standards for the two hues — and soon there was a range of blue and yellow across campus. Baby blue and pale yellow were often used to decorate campus events, while athletic teams donned deeper tones.
In 1912, the Board of Regents decided to end the discrepancy. They established a committee to define and provide examples of the exact school colors.
After researching the evolution of U-M’s two school hues, the committee decided that the shade of blue associated with U-M had started as navy, then gradually faded to baby blue. Similarly, maize had weakened to what they called an “expressionless pale yellow.”
“So delicate have the colors become, that they have not only lost their original character, but are ineffective in decorations and useless to the athletic association,” the committee wrote in a letter to the regents.
The committee decided the deeper blue adopted by U-M’s athletic clubs was preferable to the faded blue in campus décor. They described this deeper hue as “lapis lazuli, Persian blue, cobalt blue.” Maize, they determined, would be defined as the color of golden corn, not to be confused with pale lemon, a hue they wrote “should be avoided.”
The deeper blue color when combined with maize, the committee wrote, “forms a beautiful decoration, and, if the blue is not too dark, shows well by artificial light.”
To quell future color confusion — and to serve as examples for all university events, materials and attire — the committee selected maize and blue ribbons in the now-official U-M shades. These ribbons are preserved today in the Bentley Historical Library’s archive.
