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. By 1925 the IBAC was using an “equal parts” division of the colors, which meant that the hood lining was divided equally into three parts, with the divisions of the colors along the lines of a chevron. This was roughly equivalent to a hood that used an extra-wide chevron of six inches in width or greater. The Bureau did not assign a lining divided into “equal parts” very often, as it tended to hide the upper color when the hood was folded and worn, which gave the colors in the lining the appearance of being divided per chevron. To avoid this problem, on this website schools originally assigned a “wide chevron” or “equal parts” division have usually been reassigned a pattern using two or three chevrons.

The hood lining of the College of the Pacific has been inconsistently described. The Intercollegiate Bureau assigned the college a hood lining that was “orange, black, orange equal parts” no later than 1927, according to an IBAC list from that period. But by 1948 the IBAC described the college’s hood lining as “orange and black”, which typically indicated a hood lining with the colors divided vertically (per pale). This would have duplicated the hood lining pattern the Bureau had already assigned to Midland College prior to 1927. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the University of the Pacific’s hood lining as burnt orange with a black chevron, which was a duplication of the hood lining already assigned to Occidental College in California and an inaccurate description of Pacific’s shade of orange. Finally, 1969 and 1972 IBAC lists stated that the hood lining of the University of Pacific was orange with a black chevron, which was a duplication of the hood lining the Bureau had already assigned to Princeton University in 1895. To avoid the duplications in these later hood lining assignments, and to avoid the problems with the “equal parts” division of the lining colors discussed above, here the University of the Pacific has been assigned a hood lined orange with three black chevrons.