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. 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.

East Central State Normal School (“East Central State College” after 1939) 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. Lists compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) Academic Dress and Insignia of the World (1970) described the college’s hood lining as burnt orange with a reversed black chevron. East Central’s chevron had been inverted to avoid duplicating the hood lining the IBAC had already assigned to Occidental College (burnt orange with a black chevron). Because metallic fabrics were not used by Cotrell & Leonard (the depository for the Intercollegiate Bureau), orange, burnt orange, and gold were often used as synonyms to describe a given shade of hood lining fabric, which explains why the IBAC described East Central’s hood lining as “gold” with a reversed black chevron in a list from 1972 even though the actual school color was burnt orange.