Post by Turennehttp://www.bnc.ox.ac.uk/history/his/page5.html
Many colleges seem to have adopted arms without proper authority.
Maybe that's why you're having difficulty in finding a compendium of
blazons..
There is an interesting analogy in the arms of the houses of Harvard
University. Harvard assumed arms for itself already in the 17th
century. By the end of the 19th century variants began to appear for
many of the diversified faculties. Around 1930 the university was
reorganized into residential 'houses' (modeled on the Oxford and
Cambridge colleges; they currently hold about 300-400 undergraduates
each). Each was named after an individual or family prominent in the
history of Harvard or of Massachusetts. Each house soon began to use
arms. Some were derived from legitimate (English) arms of the houses'
namesakes; others were made from scratch, with varying degrees of
inventiveness and design quality. At least a couple were
misappropriated from arms belonging to people of the same surname, but
unrelated to the namesake of the house (e.g. Eliot House: President
Eliot of Harvard descended from a family of East Coker, Somerset, which
is, I think, not known to have been armigerous; the arms are those of
another family). In some cases the house arms were deliberately
differenced from those of the namesake (or whatever the source may have
been), but not, I think, in every case.
A readable descriptive survey and narrative history of Harvard's
heraldry was compiled by prof. Mason Hammond: "A Harvard armory,"
_Harvard Library Bulletin_ v. 29.3 & 29.4 (1981); and "Supplement to a
Harvard armory," _Harvard Library Bulletin_ 34.3 (1986).
The residential colleges at Yale University, organized around the same
time, were also named after prominent men associated with Yale or the
Connecticut colony--some legimitately armigerous and some not. I do not
know whether Yale did the same thing in developing arms for its
colleges.
Nat Taylor
http://www.nltaylor.net