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 beginning in 1895 the “parti per chevron” was also used quite frequently. Here the two school colors were placed in the hood lining one above the other, with the division between them following the shape of a chevron. Later the IBAC began to use a per reversed chevron division and may have employed (although this is not certain) a division per bar on rare occasions. Confusingly, in IBAC lists from 1927 and 1948, a number of hoods were described as “[color] above [color]” or “[color] over [color]” which referred either to a hood lining divided per chevron, per reversed chevron, or per bar, and today it is not usually known which of these three patterns the IBAC intended to describe.

St. Joseph’s College did not appear in early Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume lists from 1927 or 1948, so it is likely that the IBAC did not assign a hood lining pattern to the college until the 1950s, if at all. Lists compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) and Academic Dress and Insignia of the World (1970) described Siena Height’s hood lining as white with an old gold chevron, but this information might be erroneous because this pattern was a duplication of the hood lining the Intercollegiate Bureau had assigned Centre College in 1895 or 1896. An IBAC list from 1972 addressed this problem by assigning Siena Heights a hood lined “white over old gold”, but did not divulge how the two colors were divided. It was probably about this time that the college changed its school colors from white and old gold to navy blue and yellow, so here the IBAC hood lining for Siena Heights University has been updated and modified with new colors arranged in a heraldic pattern displayed on a shield in the college seal: yellow above navy blue, divided per bar.