On 16 May 1895 the Intercollegiate Commission on Academic Costume approved a uniform system of caps, gowns, and hoods for American colleges and universities called the “Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume”. The commissioners intended for every college and university to use a unique arrangement of their colors in the hood lining, which would enable an observer to “read” the hood and thereby identify the alma mater of the hood’s owner. But as an article in the 27 July 1902 edition of an Albany, NY newspaper named The Argus recalled, “the combining of two or three colors in a lining was a great problem with the commission but was solved by [Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume Director Gardner Cotrell Leonard] after some study in heraldry by the chevron, double and triple chevron, and parti-per-chevron.” These heraldic divisions of the school colors became the means by which a variety of distinctive hood lining patterns could be individually assigned to each school that chose to follow the Intercollegiate Code.

The chevron was by far the most common heraldic division the IBAC employed to divide the two or three colors in an institution’s hood, but beginning in 1895 the “triple chevron” was also used occasionally. The typical width of a normal chevron was between three and four inches, but the triple chevron pattern used three chevrons of about 1½ inches in width placed approximately two inches apart so that the color of the hood lining showed between them.

Millersville State Normal College or Millersville State Teachers College did not appear in early IBAC lists from 1927 or 1948, so the IBAC might not have assigned the college a hood lining until 1959, when the college added a liberal arts component to its curriculum, began granting four-year bachelor’s degrees, and became Millersville State College. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the university’s hood lining as gold with three black chevrons, which was also how it was described in an IBAC list from 1972.