The chevron was by far the most common heraldic division the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) employed to divide the two or three colors in an institution’s hood, but Bureau director Gardner Cotrell Leonard also used other heraldic devices to avoid assigning duplicate hood linings to colleges and universities with the same school colors. Possibly by 1918 (and certainly by 1925) one of the other heraldic divisions the IBAC occasionally used was the “reversed chevron”. Here the standard chevron of four to five inches in width was inverted so that the chevron pointed upwards.

By 1927 the IBAC had assigned Whitworth University a hood lining that was black with a red chevron. Unfortunately this was confusingly similar to the hood lining the IBAC had already assigned to Ohio Wesleyan University (black with cardinal chevron). So in the late 1940s or 1950s the IBAC transposed the colors in the university’s hood lining, and inverted the chevron to avoid confusion with of the hood lining of Wesleyan University in Connecticut (cardinal with a black chevron). A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described Whitworth’s hood lining as red with a reversed black chevron, which was also how it was described in an Intercollegiate Bureau list from 1972.

This late 1940s or 1950s  revision of Whitworth’s hood has been retained here, but with the correct university colors of crimson and black.