Robert M. Hughes and J. A. C. Chandler had been arguing for a William & Mary outpost in Norfolk for years before it happened. Joseph Healy began the actual organizing work in 1924. A. H. Foreman pushed it through. On March 13, 1930, the Norfolk Division was approved; on September 3, H. Edgar Timmerman became its first director; on September 12, the doors opened. The school remained a William & Mary branch for thirty-two years before it became an independent college in 1962, and seven years after that it was granted university status. The name draws on Virginia's old nickname - The Old Dominion - given by King Charles II in thanks for Virginia's loyalty during the English Civil War. ODU's mascot, the Monarch, plays the same card.

Hampton Roads has the largest naval base in the world and the East Coast's busiest container port. ODU built itself around those facts. The Strome College of Business runs MBA concentrations in maritime, transportation, and port logistics management - rare anywhere in the U.S. The International Maritime, Ports & Logistics Institute, founded in partnership with regional industry, was ranked eighth in the world for port research in a 2011 study of the period 1980 to 2009. The Frank Reidy Research Center for Bioelectrics works at the edge of medicine and physics. The Center for Accelerator Science is paired with Jefferson Lab down the road. In 2010, the Batten College of Engineering became the first U.S. college to offer every degree level - bachelor through Ph.D. - in Modeling and Simulation, the technical specialty that drives the Department of Defense's training simulators.

On October 1, 2020, ODU launched the first dedicated School of Cybersecurity in the United States. The school offers undergraduate and graduate programs in cybersecurity and cyber operations, drawing faculty from across the university and from military affairs. Hampton Roads is home to Naval Network Warfare Command, Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command, NATO Allied Command Transformation, the Armed Forces Staff College, and a Department of Defense ecosystem that needs people who can defend networks. ODU built the school where that demand is densest. The students' dormitory, Owens House, opened on the Runte Quad in 2020 with most of its 470 beds occupied by cybersecurity, STEM, and entrepreneurship majors.

The main campus sits between the Elizabeth River on the west and the Lafayette River on the east, about five miles north of downtown Norfolk. The oldest part of campus is the Williamsburg Lawn, where Rollins Hall and Spong Hall still stand. Around Kaufman Mall cluster Constant Hall, Dragas Hall, Monarch Hall, Kaufman Hall, and the Webb Center student union. To the east of Hampton Boulevard, the ODU Real Estate Foundation has built University Village - the Ted Constant Convocation Center, the Barry Art Museum, a Marriott SpringHill Suites, an innovation research park, theaters and restaurants. Foreman Field, where ODU football had played since 1936, was torn down in 2019 and replaced with SB Ballard Stadium. The new biology building is scheduled for 2026. Walk across campus and you can trace ninety-six years of ambition in the brickwork.

ODU's athletic programs are old, deep, and unexpectedly decorated. The Lady Monarchs basketball team won three national championships - 1979 and 1980 under the AIAW, 1985 under the NCAA - and reached the Women's NCAA championship game in 1997. The field hockey program has won nine national titles, the most in NCAA history. Men's and women's sailing have added fifteen more national championships. The Monarchs joined the Sun Belt Conference on July 1, 2022, after stints in the Colonial Athletic Association and Conference USA. The 2024 merger with Eastern Virginia Medical School - now Macon and Joan Brock Virginia Health Sciences at ODU - gave the university its own medical school, and brought a hundred years of regional medical training under one institutional roof.