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 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. Later the IBAC began to use a per reversed chevron division and a division per bar on rare occasions. Confusingly, in Intercollegiate Bureau 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 Bureau intended to describe.

The IBAC assigned Seton Hall College a hood lined “white above navy blue”, according to IBAC lists from 1927 and 1948, but the heraldic division between the colors was not defined. Seton Hall’s hood lining colors were probably divided per chevron, as a 1918 Intercollegiate Bureau list described Wheaton College in Massachusetts as having a hood lined “white above blue” (later “Yale blue”) per reversed chevron, which suggests Seton Hall had been the first to be assigned “white above navy blue” with a per chevron division. (In that same 1918 list, the University of Kentucky was also cited as having a hood lined “white above blue” per chevron, but “blue” in this case referred to a royal blue shade.)

Unfortunately, the Bureau redesigned Seton Hall’s hood lining in the late 1940s or 1950s to be Yale blue with a white chevron, as this is the description found in a list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) and in a 1969 IBAC list. This revision inadvertently duplicated the hood linings the Intercollegiate Bureau had already assigned to Pennsylvania State University (navy blue with a white chevron) and Middlebury College (Yale blue with a white chevron) in the early 1900s. A 1972 IBAC list revised Seton Hall’s hood once again by interchanging the colors, but to no avail: now it was a duplication of the hood lining for Marietta College (white with a navy blue chevron).

Here the original Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume hood lining assignment for Seton Hall (which the Bureau had designed to avoid these problems) has been restored.