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 beginning in 1895 the “double chevron” was also used quite frequently. 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.

To avoid duplicating the hood lining already assigned to the University of Alabama (crimson with a white chevron), the IBAC assigned Hastings College a hood lining that was crimson with two white chevrons no later than 1927, according to an Intercollegiate Bureau list from that period. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the hood lining of Hastings as maroon with two white chevrons, which was an erroneous description of the college’s crimson color.

Unfortunately, the hood lining the Bureau authorized for Hastings is too easily confused with the hood lining the Bureau earlier assigned to Cornell University (carnelian with two white chevrons), and the different color terms the IBAC used to describe the shade of Cornell’s red and Hastings’s red disguised the fact that the hood linings were, in practice, indistinguishable. To resolve this problem, here the two white chevrons of Hastings College have been inverted to create a hood lined crimson with two reversed white chevrons, a correction the Intercollegiate Bureau used for duplications of this sort by 1927 at the latest.

Alabama’s chevron has likewise been inverted to avoid a similar duplication with Dickinson College.