Qualla: Christopher Newport University

Christopher Newport University: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lyricmac, CC BY-SA 4.0. Captain Christopher Newport lost his right arm to a Spanish cannonball in 1590 and kept sailing. He made five voyages across the Atlantic to Virginia, including the one in 1607 that first touched land at Cape Henry—now part of Virginia Beach—before sailing upriver to put 105 men and boys ashore at Jamestown. The 75-acre Newport News campus that now bears his name was not, however, named for him by accident or affection. It was named in 1960 by a city government joining with the state to build a new commuter college, and the site they chose to put it on was a stable, increasingly middle-class African-American neighborhood that the city took by eminent domain.

Image: Lyricmac | CC BY-SA 4.0

Christopher Newport University: Extension School

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Alter from Newport News, USA, CC BY 2.0. Christopher Newport College opened in 1961 in the old John W. Daniel School building, an extension of the College of William and Mary in nearby Williamsburg. The mission was practical: serve mid-career working professionals, military personnel, and non-traditional students of Ham...

Image: Tony Alter from Newport News, USA | CC BY 2.0

Christopher Newport University: The Trible Era

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Alter from Newport News, USA, CC BY 2.0. Paul S. Trible Jr., a former U.S. senator from Virginia, became CNU's fourth president in 1996 and stayed for twenty-six years. He arrived determined to turn a regional commuter college into a residential liberal arts university, and he did. New residence halls went up. A neo-Geo...

Image: Tony Alter from Newport News, USA | CC BY 2.0

Christopher Newport University: The Captains

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Alter from Newport News, USA, CC BY 2.0. Athletics at CNU compete as the Captains, named for the man on the statue at the center of campus. The football team plays in the New Jersey Athletic Conference because the school's primary conference, the Coast to Coast Athletic Conference, does not sponsor football. The 2021-20...

Image: Tony Alter from Newport News, USA | CC BY 2.0

Christopher Newport University: Alumni in Strange Places

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Alter from Newport News, USA, CC BY 2.0. Randall Munroe, class of 2006, took a physics degree from CNU to a NASA contracting job and from there to drawing stick figures on the internet. His comic xkcd became one of the most widely read webcomics in the world. Cassidy Hutchinson, class of 2019, worked her way into the We...

Image: Tony Alter from Newport News, USA | CC BY 2.0

Christopher Newport University: Reckoning

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TheNewWiki at English Wikipedia, Public domain. The neighborhood that was cleared for CNU's campus does not exist anymore, and the institution that replaced it owes its presence to a kind of municipal violence that was common across mid-century America: white-controlled cities using eminent domain to dismantle Black neighborho...

Image: TheNewWiki at English Wikipedia | Public domain