To avoid assigning duplicate hood linings to colleges and universities that used the same school colors, the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) used different types of heraldic patterns to divide the two or more colors in an academic hood. One of the heraldic divisions the Bureau frequently employed was a “double chevron”. The typical width of a normal chevron was between three and four inches, but the double chevron pattern used two chevrons of about 1½ inches in width placed approximately two inches apart so that the color of the hood lining showed between them.

Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume lists from 1927, 1948, and 1972 described the hood lining of Defiance College as purple with two gold chevrons. However, these lists also cited several other schools with identical lining patterns: Albion College (MI), Baltimore Law School (MD), Denver Conservatory of Music (CO), Scio College (OH), and Union Christian College (IN). All but Albion College were defunct by the time the 1927 IBAC list appeared, so perhaps some of what appear to be duplicate patterns were actually the assignments for defunct schools that had been reassigned to new schools.

Also, to conserve space, early Intercollegiate Bureau lists did not carefully indicate whether a “two chevron” citation described a standard or inverted orientation of the chevrons. This may have been the case with the description of Defiance’s hood lining. Albion’s two chevron assignment was almost certainly earlier, which would suggest that the IBAC inverted Defiance’s two chevrons. Normally, Kevin Sheard’s research in the 1960s is helpful in clarifying these matters, but unfortunately he did not list information about Defiance College in Academic Heraldry in America (1962), and in Academic Dress and Insignia of the World (1970) he said that Defiance was using a hood lined purple with a (single) gold chevron, a duplication of the Bureau’s hood lining assignment for Northwestern University.