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 a college or university’s hood, but by 1918 Bureau director Gardner Cotrell Leonard was also using was what he called a “wide chevron”. The typical width of a normal chevron was between three and four inches, but the wide chevron hood lining used a chevron with a width of 4½ inches, five inches, six inches, or more. The IBAC did not assign a wide chevron very often, as it tended to hide the color above the chevron when the hood was folded and worn, which gave the lining the appearance of being divided per chevron.

At some point during first couple of decades of the 1900s, the IBAC assigned Butler University a hood lining that was Yale blue with a white “double width” (1927, 1948) or “7 inch wide” (1972) chevron, according to IBAC lists from those dates. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the university’s hood lining as royal blue with a (standard width) white chevron. This was an erroneous citation, because Butler’s hood would have been too easily confused with the hood lining pattern the Intercollegiate Bureau had assigned to Duke University (royal blue with a white chevron) in the early 1900s – which was precisely why the IBAC had assigned Butler a wide chevron in the first place. Because of the problems associated with the wide chevron discussed above, the hood lining for Butler has been redesigned by dividing the single wide chevron into three thinner chevrons.