It might be a matter of opinion; it might be a matter of color.

“Wichita State University, we are brave and we’re bold. So we will fight, fight, Wichita, for the Black and Gold.”

Those are the final words of the ‘Shocker Fight Song.’ On the other hand, the Wichita State Alma Mater mentions “the yellow and the black.”

Recently, there has been some discrepancy about the official colors of Wichita State University, nationally and in Wichita.

Some students say it’s gold because the word “Shocker” deals with wheat, which is usually a light golden color.

Others say it’s yellow, pointing to all the WSU shirts and logos in the Rhatigan Student Center.

If anyone knows exactly what the official color is, it is Barth Hague, WSU’s Associate Vice President of University Relations and Chief Marketing Officer.

“The official color is yellow. In fact, officially it’s referred to as WSU Yellow,” he said. “There’s a particular Pantone color that is used to create WSU yellow.”

He’s referring to Pantone 109U (or Pantone 116C for coated applications), which is part of the Pantone Color Matching System, a system designed to standardize colors.

Having the exact Pantone color code allows a universal standardization of what ‘WSU Yellow’ looks like on university documents, t-shirts and other memorabilia.

Some vendors, however, do not have the ability to exactly recreate ‘WSU Yellow.’

“You go to a particular vendor, they already have stock colors. In some cases, you’re stuck with having to choose from their stock of colors,” Hague said. “And sometimes those colors are much more gold than what our actual school color is. It’s very hard to get close.”

It isn’t hard to imagine a viewer watching a WSU basketball game on national television and mistaking WSU’s yellow for gold, considering the wide range of not-quite-yellow shirts in the crowd.

“I have a shirt in my closet that I sometimes wear to Shocker games that’s really gold… it’s almost orange,” Hague said.

Barth said he is not bothered by people referring to WSU’s colors as black and gold, but reaffirmed the school’s official colors.

“In the larger scheme of things it doesn’t matter,” he said, “but officially when we’re referring to the colors, it’s always black and yellow.”