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 president Gardner Cotrell Leonard also used other heraldic devices to avoid assigning duplicate hood linings to colleges and universities that used the same school colors. Possibly by 1918 (and certainly by 1927) one of the other heraldic divisions the IBAC occasionally used was the “reversed chevron”. Here the standard chevron of between three and four inches in width was inverted so that the chevron pointed upwards.

Bethel University did not appear in early IBAC lists from 1927 or 1948, so the IBAC might not have assigned the college a hood lining until the late 1940s or 1950s – if at all. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the university’s hood lining as purple with a “gold” (not “Vegas gold” or “old gold”) reversed chevron. An IBAC list from 1972 erroneously stated that the chevron was a standard chevron, and that it was “gold” (again, not “Vegas gold” or “old gold”). This would have caused Bethel’s hood lining to duplicate the Bureau’s hood lining description for Northwestern University, which suggests the IBAC’s citation may have been nothing more that a (slightly inaccurate) record of Bethel’s school colors applied to a generic hood pattern. But Sheard’s description was also problematic – it duplicated the hood lining the Bureau had assigned to Texas College (purple with a reversed old gold chevron).

In actual practice, Texas College used a dark shade of purple, which means Sheard’s description of Bethel’s hood lining (with the correct colors of purple and old gold) would have been unique. For that reason, this pattern has been used here.