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 occasionally 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.

Salem College appeared in IBAC lists from 1927 and 1948 as having a hood lined olive green with a white chevron. But because this was a duplication of the hood lining already assigned to Ohio University around 1902, the IBAC citations for Salem in 1927 and 1948 were probably nothing more than a notation of the university’s school colors from the World Almanac attached to a generic (or hypothetical) hood lining arrangement.

The Bureau would actually assign Salem a hood lining in the late 1940s or 1950s, and to avoid duplicating Ohio University’s hood lining the IBAC inverted Salem’s chevron. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the college’s hood lining as olive green with a white reversed chevron, which was also how it was described in an Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume list from 1972.