The chevron was by far the most common heraldic division Gardner Cotrell Leonard’s Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) employed to divide the two or three colors in an institution’s hood, but beginning in 1895 the Bureau also began to place two colors in a hood lining so that one was above the other, with the division between them following the geometric shape of a chevron, a reversed chevron, or a horizontal bar. Confusingly, IBAC lists from 1927 and 1948 described a number of hoods as “[color] above [color]” or “[color] over [color]” without saying whether the colors were divided per chevron, per reversed chevron, or per bar, so today it is not usually known which of these three patterns the Bureau intended to describe.

The Intercollegiate Bureau often used “bright red” to describe scarlet, so it assigned Seton Hill University a hood lined “bright red above gold” no later than 1927, according to an IBAC list from that period. Later Intercollegiate Bureau lists from 1948 and 1972 modified the description of Seton Hill’s hood lining to “red over gold”.

Whether these descriptions refer to a division of the colors per chevron, per reversed chevron, or per bar is unknown, but a list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described Seton Hill’s hood lining as crimson above gold, divided per chevron. However, since the school seal of Seton Hill is divided per bar, that heraldic division has been used for the university’s hood lining here, along with the university’s official shade of scarlet.