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. Possibly by 1918 (and certainly by 1927) 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.

Alabama College was listed in IBAC lists from 1927 and 1948 as having a hood lined purple with a gold chevron, but this appeared to be nothing more than a record of the college’s colors applied to a generic hood lining. The IBAC probably assigned Alabama College a hood lining in the late 1940s or 1950s, and to avoid confusion with the hood linings already assigned to the Regents of the University of the State of New York (Excelsior College) and to Northwestern University, the IBAC inverted the chevron in Alabama College’s lining. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the college’s hood lining pattern as purple with a reversed gold chevron, which was also how it was described in an IBAC list from 1972. This was a recycling of a hood pattern the Intercollegiate Bureau had originally assigned to Kansas City University, but it went defunct in 1933.