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 Bureau began to use a per reversed chevron division and a division per bar on rare occasions. Confusingly, in IBAC 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 Intercollegiate Bureau assigned Valparaiso University a hood lined “old gold above brown” no later than 1927, according to an IBAC list from that period. Intercollegiate Bureau lists from 1948 and 1972 used a similar description, except that “old gold” was changed to “gold”, a common way the IBAC began to abbreviate “old gold” in later citations. The Bureau typically used “brown” to indicate a dark shade of brown, and because Valparaiso was the only institution with this hood lining description, the division between the two colors was probably per chevron. Lists compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) and Academic Dress and Insignia of the World (1970) inaccurately described Valparaiso’s hood lining as old gold with a brown chevron.

Here the university’s original IBAC assignment has been used.