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 1902 one of the other heraldic divisions the IBAC used was a “zone” of color, which is how the IBAC described a horizontal bar. Like the chevron, the bar was approximately four to five inches in width and extended from one side of the hood lining to the other.

The IBAC assigned Whittier College a hood lining that was purple with a gold “zone” no later than 1927, according to an IBAC list from that period. Identical descriptions also appeared in 1948 and 1972 lists from the Intercollegiate Bureau. However, a 1969 IBAC list repeated an erroneous citation from a list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962), which described Whittier’s hood lining as purple with a bright gold chevron.