It's V-i-r-g-i-n-i-a-a-a-a!

Honor still matters in Virginia. Dick Bestwick, the Virginia football coach, had been an assistant at Georgia Tech, and last winter he had a chance to return there as head man. His contract at The University was up. "I was never really worried Dick would go," says Gene Corrigan, the athletic director. "Dick is an honorable man, and I don't believe, whatever Tech might have offered, that Dick could have stood up before the team he had brought here and told those boys he was leaving them."

The men who predominated at The University until well into this century were raised on the glories of honor, the garlands of chivalry and the noble lost cause that ended with The War Between the States (never The Civil War). It is still customary in the Commonwealth that the history of Virginia be taught in the fourth, seventh and 11th grades. Virginia rewrote much of the history of the war. General Robert E. Lee, Virginian, became an impossible paradox: a Christlike warrior. And, of course, if General Stonewall Jackson, Virginian, hadn't been killed at Chancellorsville, Lee would have had Jackson to depend upon at Gettysburg instead of South Carolina's James Longstreet, and the Army of Northern Virginia would have been marching triumphantly through downtown Albany, N.Y. the following Tuesday.

So Virginians grow up understanding that defeat is often explicable and never so important as the cause—which probably is a fine way to live unless you're playing Ohio State. Surely it is no coincidence that the other Confederate state that is so tradition-bound is South Carolina—North Carolina refers to itself as "a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit"—and South Carolina's state university has, after Virginia's, the most woeful athletic heritage in Dixie. So cherished is defeat in the Virginia tradition that its fondest sports memory is of a loss. It was 1941, the year The University had its only Everybody's All-America, Bullet Bill Dudley, and nearly had its only perfect season, too. The Wahoos were ahead of Yale 19-0 at the half but lost 21-19. And here's the punch line the alumni really savor: not only was it Virginia's lone defeat, but it was also Yale's only victory. Beautiful. If Stonewall Jackson hadn't been shot at Chancellorsville, then when Lee told Long-street to attack and....

But The University's ambivalence has hardly been restricted to the winning and losing of games. "The paradoxes begin with Mister Jefferson himself," Staige Blackford says. "Here was this great liberal thinker, and his final, fondest dream ended up as a citadel of conservatism and conformity." Mister Jefferson didn't even want degrees awarded, dismissing them (rather in the manner of The Wizard of Oz) as "artificial embellishments," and while the faculty subsequently overruled him, generations of student bodies took him at face value. Any warm white male body could get into The University, and there was a disposition then to stay around. These perennials were known as "quituates" and numbered many distinguished Virginians who idled about Hookville for years before drifting on, sans degree.

Mister Jefferson had also hoped his Academical Village would "be a temptation to the youth of other states to come, and drink the cup of knowledge and fraternize with us," but, alas, it was seldom that particular vessel that the displaced Yankee preppies imbibed from at U. Va.—Yooveeay, as it has always been known. Until the '50s, as many as half of the first-year students came from out-of-state, and a fourth were preppies, who ruled the fraternities, which ruled The Grounds. About two-thirds of the jocks were also preppies. "Lettermen were always the leaders at The University," says William L. Zimmer III, Rector of The University, 1976-80, and head of The Board of Visitors, which anywhere else would be the chairman of the Board of Trustees. Mister Jefferson was the first Rector.

None of this is meant to suggest that Yooveeay was an academic backwater; a diploma had to be earned, and the graduate schools—especially law—developed national reputations. But the student body remained remarkably homogeneous for a so-called state school. E. Massie Valentine '56, a member of The Board, says, "It was the only private state institution in the country. We didn't like to admit that, but it was so." So tightly knit was Yooveeay's population that secret societies there made the famous secret clubs at Yale, such as Skull and Bones, seem like Master Charge by comparison. There is still a society at The University known as The Sevens, and while its name and good deeds pop up periodically, no one knows the first thing about it, and members' identities are revealed, mysteriously, only in their obituaries.

The antebellum Yooveeay was smaller only than Harvard and Yale, but it is a tiny state school now (10,838 undergraduates), and until recently only 5,000 men inhabited the insular little world in the foothills of the Blue Ridge. The University was just one more pearl in that string of exclusive Virginia The's: The Church (St. Paul's Episcopal in Richmond), The Hot (Springs), The War (not World War II), The General (not Longstreet), The Beach (Virginia Beach), The Country Club (of Virginia), The High School (Episcopal High in Alexandria, which isn't a high school at all but a boys' boarding school), and even The Hunt (Deep Run).

Since 1842 students have been bound by The Honor System, which, though hardly unique to Virginia, has always been more pervasive there than in other academic groves. It was established after a professor was shot on The Lawn and nobody confessed to the deed. The decree went out that a Virginia gentleman did not lie, cheat or steal. If by chance he did, it was "an offense against the whole community," and he was confronted and obliged to leave.

When The University was a tightly knit, stylized community, the system worked with little controversy. Terry Holland, the Wahoo basketball coach, went to Davidson, a small Southern private school, essentially what Yooveeay used to be. "At Davidson, you knew The Honor System could work smoothly," Holland says, "because everybody knew everybody."

Now the system is under fire. Never have the Wahoos been so critical of The Honor System. Especially at issue is the principle of "single sanction," which means simply that those found guilty are banished forever.