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

Says Zimmer, "I admit single sanction is extreme, and I personally am willing to consider modifications, but the trouble is that everywhere you have a gradation of The Honor System, it kills it. In the old days, The Honor System was a spirit, perhaps ethereal at best, but that's what made it live. As we have added more codification, the spirit has weakened."

A couple of football players have been sent packing for honor violations in the past two seasons, and some members of the athletic department think the system is too drastic. Says one coach, "You bring a kid in from a prep school, from an upper middle-class culture, fine and dandy, but you get some boy in here who is strange to this society, under pressure, he makes one mistake, and boom, he's marked for life." A law-school graduate who went to a prep school and was familiar with the system recalls an out-of-state classmate being expelled, shortly after he arrived at The University, for taking free Cokes from a defective soft-drink machine. "Sure he took the Cokes," says the student, "but that kid was gone before he knew what hit him."

The system's weakness is not that some students will lie and cheat and never be caught—there is no pretense that it is foolproof—but that honor is an absolute. The system purports to extend into every phase of university life, yet it cannot be absolute, nor was it ever meant to be. This places the greatest burden on those most honorable. Everyone is supposed to be, morally, a virgin, while in fact everybody knows he is a little bit pregnant. Asking college kids to mess around with such absolutes is a tricky business; the athletic parallel is gamblers telling players they can shave points and still play to win.

But at Virginia it has always been understood that only what is "reprehensible" is an offense. Students at Yooveeay sit around and debate what constitutes reprehensibility the way their medieval peers used to agonize over how many angels could stand on the head of a pin.

Down from The Rotunda, along The Lawn—which the English historian John Wheeler-Bennett called "the most beautiful man-made thing in the United States"—are cramped single rooms which are awarded to outstanding fourth-year students. These prized cubbyholes are without bathrooms and kitchens (just as they were when Edgar Allan Poe resided in one), so hot pots are permitted. But toaster-ovens are expressly prohibited. A resident of The Lawn admits, however, that the students have made "a judgment call" and have decided that breaking the toaster-oven law is not reprehensible. Now many rooms are so equipped.

Members of The Board can recall that in the golden days, a student caught cheating in a penny-ante card game off campus would have departed forever the next dawn. But it was also always understood that offenses relating to liquor lay outside the code: Students who scrupulously followed The Honor System all their days never felt any compunction about lying about their age or falsifying I.D. cards.

Women, too, were, we may say, winked at where The Honor System was concerned. It was the old Southern code, carried into the 20th century, that a woman who permitted herself to be dishonored by a gentleman was not an honorable woman; ergo, no man could be dishonorable to her.

The irony of Yooveeay's long-standing all-male status was that women defined the place by not being present. Most of the fabled drinking and partying was en route, in search. It was called, whatever the direction, "goin' down the road," and every night a significant portion of The University student body would pile into cars and head off after coeds, to Sweet Briar, Mary Washington, Hollins, Randolph-Macon. The more sophisticated and well-heeled would incline toward Lynchburg and a well-known sporting house there. These journeys weren't measured by conventional mileage but by the number of beers that could be consumed along the way; Hollins, for example, was a long haul, a 12-beer trip. With the admittance of women at Yooveeay enrollment has almost doubled, but only half as many students are killed annually in auto accidents.

There is hardly a Virginia alumnus who cannot recall some streak period, when he went down the road 34 nights in a row—or 47 or 52. It was the ultimate in male bonding, men together, being boys, chasing girls—who were kept in their place, which was a six-pack or two away. Dick Fogg, who played on the Wahoo football team that tied the national record, 28 losses in a row, 1958-60, says, "Maybe a lot of guys wouldn't admit this then, but for most of us, goin' down the road was better than when we got there."

"Women have made a change here in the last decade because they've made the men change," says John Casteen '65, the Dean of Admissions. "The type of boy that used to be so much in evidence here, the one that went down the road every night, was a sort of self-destructive Lord Byron type. And that kind of man just doesn't appeal to smart women now, if indeed he ever really did. All of a sudden that type discovered that he just wasn't fashionable to the opposite sex, and that was the end of him."