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 employed was a “reversed chevron”. Here the standard chevron of between three and four inches in width was inverted so that the chevron pointed upwards.

Morningside College appeared in a 1927 IBAC list as having a hood lined maroon with a white chevron. This was probably nothing more than a record of the college’s colors applied to a generic hood lining pattern, as this was a duplication of the hood lining arrangement the Bureau had already assigned to Lafayette College in 1896.

The IBAC officially assigned Morningside a unique hood lining pattern in the late 1940s or 1950s. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described Morningside’s hood lining as maroon with a reversed white chevron, a description also found in a 1972 Intercollegiate Bureau list. Again this was problematic: the IBAC had earlier assigned Texas A&M University an identical hood lining (maroon with a reversed white chevron).

To avoid these duplication problems, Morningside has had the colors of its official IBAC hood lining assignment transposed to create a white hood lining with a reversed maroon chevron, a hood lining pattern the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume did not assign to any other college or university.