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. 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.

A description of the hood lining used by Simmons College did not appear in Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) lists from 1927 or 1948, but Hardin-Simmons University was cited by Kevin Sheard in both Academic Heraldry in America (1962) and Academic Dress and Insignia of the World (1970) as having a hood lined purple with a reversed gold chevron. A 1972 IBAC list described the hood lining in an identical fashion.

Since the actual shade of the university’s purple was royal purple, the Bureau’s reference may have been nothing more than a description of the university’s hood lining the IBAC had borrowed from Sheard, and not an official Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume assignment. Having said that, by this point the IBAC had largely stopped distinguishing between “royal purple” and “purple” in its lists, probably to save space. In either case, with the correct colors of royal purple and gold, the hood lining pattern cited for Hardin-Simmons is unique and not one the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume had assigned to any other college or university.