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 Gardner Cotrell Leonard, the president of the Bureau, 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 College of St. Benedict did not appear in early IBAC lists from 1927 or 1948, so the IBAC probably did not assign the college a hood lining until the late 1940s or 1950s. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described St. Benedict’s hood lining as red with a white reversed chevron, which was also how it was described in an IBAC list from 1972. This was not a wise aesthetic choice, because if the shade of St. Benedict’s red chevron was cardinal, the IBAC had already assigned an identical hood lining to Northern Baptist Theological Seminary (cardinal with a reversed white chevron). Here this problem has been avoided by reassigning the College of St. Benedict a hood lining with interchanged colors – white with a reversed cardinal chevron – an arrangement no other college or university uses.