The chapter on American academic hoods in the 1923 edition of The Degrees and Hoods of the World’s Colleges and Universities by Frank Haycraft included a description of the 1895 Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume and a long list of schools, each with a description of its hood lining. The chapter was written in a way that implied that this list was from the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC). Actually, most of Haycraft’s American hood information was out of date (from c.1912) or inaccurate, derived from a chart of college colors in the 1909 and 1910 editions of the World Almanac, with the first color in this chart interpreted by Haycraft to indicate the lining color of the school’s hood and the second color in the chart interpreted to indicate the chevron color of the school’s hood.

That said, some of the schools in Haycraft’s book did not appear in the 1909 and 1910 editions of the World Almanac or were listed differently in those sources. So apparently Haycraft was given a partial list of college and university hoods from the IBAC and he supplemented that list with additional schools from the 1909 or 1910 World Almanac. Middlebury College was an example of an institution that did not appear in the 1909 and 1910 editions of the World Almanac, which suggests that the college’s hood lining description cited by Haycraft might have been from information he received from the IBAC around 1912. Haycraft described Middlebury’s hood lining as blue with a white chevron.

The first definitive IBAC description of the college’s hood is from 1927; here it was similarly described as “Yale blue” with a white chevron, a description that did not change in subsequent IBAC lists. The IBAC often used “Yale blue” to describe a dark blue shade, which means the IBAC was guilty of employing a semantic sleight-of-hand by assigning Middlebury a hood lining that was practically indistinguishable from the hood lining the IBAC had also assigned to Pennsylvania State University (navy blue with a white chevron).