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. 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.
The IBAC assigned Ohio Northern University a hood lining that was orange with a black “reversed chevron” no later than 1927, according to an IBAC list from that period. This hood lining description did not change in subsequent IBAC lists. However, a list compiled by Kevin Sheard for Academic Dress and Insignia of the World (1970) described the university’s hood lining as orange with a black chevron, which must be erroneous because this was a duplication of the hood lining the IBAC had assigned to Princeton University in 1895.
Detailed historical information about the orange and black colors of Ohio Northern University is not available at this time, except to say that some sources refer to the colors as gold and black.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): orange/black (1906-1935)