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 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.

The IBAC assigned California Baptist University a hood lining that was dark blue with a white “reversed chevron” in the mid to late 1960s. The university’s hood lining was first described in list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Dress and Insignia of the World (1970) as royal blue with a reversed white chevron, and then as (plain) blue with a reversed white chevron in an IBAC list from 1972. Both of these descriptions may have been describing a shade of “true blue” (medium blue) that was lighter than the university’s official navy blue, and of course both sources erroneously misidentified California Baptist’s secondary color as white instead of gold.

To correct these problems, and to avoid confusion with the hood already assigned to Marquette University (Yale blue with a reversed gold chevron), California Baptist University has been reassigned a hood lining pattern that echoes the heraldry of the university’s seal.