On 16 May 1895 the Intercollegiate Commission on Academic Costume approved a uniform system of caps, gowns, and hoods for American colleges and universities called the “Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume”. The commissioners intended for every college and university to use a unique arrangement of their colors in the hood lining which would enable an observer to “read” the hood and thereby identify the alma mater of the hood’s owner. But as an article in the 27 July 1902 edition of an Albany, NY newspaper named The Argus recalled, “the combining of two or three colors in a lining was a great problem with the commission but was solved by [Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume Director Gardner Cotrell Leonard] after some study in heraldry by the chevron, double and triple chevron, and parti-per-chevron.” These heraldic divisions of the school colors became the means by which a variety of distinctive hood lining patterns could be individually assigned to each school that chose to follow the Intercollegiate Code.

The chevron was by far the most common heraldic division the IBAC employed to divide the two or three colors in an institution’s hood, but beginning in 1895 the “parti per chevron” was also used quite frequently. Here the two school colors were placed in the hood lining one above the other, with the division between them following the shape of a chevron. Confusingly, in IBAC lists from 1927 and 1948, a number of hoods were described as “[color] above [color]” or “[color] over [color]” which referred either to a hood lining divided per chevron, per reversed chevron, or per bar, and today it is not usually known which of these three patterns the IBAC intended to describe.

The IBAC assigned North Carolina Agricultural and Engineering College a hood lined “cardinal above white” between 1918 and 1927, according to an IBAC list from that period. “Cardinal” or “crimson” was how the IBAC often described the color of schools that used a “true red” without otherwise defining the shade. The IBAC described the hood lining of Santa Clara College using the same phrase (“cardinal above white”), which implied a different, but unstated, division of the two colors. North Carolina A&E was probably the second institution to have been assigned a “cardinal above white” pattern, so the heraldic division the college’s colors may have been per reversed chevron. The 1927 description of the college’s hood did not substantively change in subsequent IBAC lists until 1969, where the newly-named North Carolina State University was described as having a hood lined cardinal with a white chevron. The IBAC must have realized its error, as this would have duplicated the hood lining already assigned to Dickinson College (cardinal with a white chevron) between 1895 and 1902, so a 1972 IBAC list reverted to “cardinal over white”.