To avoid assigning duplicate hood linings to colleges and universities that used the same school colors, the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) used different types of heraldic patterns to divide the two or more colors in an academic hood. One of the heraldic divisions the Bureau frequently employed was a “double chevron”. The typical width of a normal chevron was between three and four inches, but the double chevron pattern used two chevrons of about 1½ inches in width placed two inches apart so that the color of the hood lining showed between them.

Kansas State Agricultural College appeared in 1927, 1948, and 1972 Intercollegiate Bureau lists as having a single-color hood lining that was purple, but this was probably not an officially-authorized assignment because it would have duplicated the hood lining the IBAC had already assigned in 1895 or 1896 to former Bureau president Gardner Cotrell Loenard’s alma mater Williams College.

The Intercollegiate Bureau officially assigned the college a hood lining when it became a university in 1959, but by this point the Bureau had stopped distinguishing between “royal purple” and “purple”. So, the university was assigned a “purple” lining with two white chevrons to avoid duplicating the hood lining of Mount Union College (royal purple with a white chevron). A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described Kansas State University’s hood lining as purple with two white chevrons, which was also how the hood lining was described in IBAC lists from 1969 and 1972. (The 1972 list contains an anomaly: the school was listed twice – once as Kansas State Agricultural College and again as Kansas State University.)

None of these citations accurately described the hood lining as “royal purple”, the official shade of the university’s color. This error has been corrected here.