NEWPORT NEWS Shannon Hunt loves the small classes, the professors who will join her for lunch, the apartment-like dorm rooms and her feeling that she attends one of Virginia's best public universities.

"It's getting outstanding," she said. "I think I will be proud to say I went here."

Hunt, a 20-year-old communications major from Portsmouth, is in her third year at Christopher Newport University, which not long ago was a take-anyone commuter school sarcastically derided as "Harvard on the James."

But during the past half-dozen years or so, in spite of severe cutbacks in state funding for public colleges and universities, CNU has been transforming itself into a selective, residential liberal-arts school bristling with new dorms, buildings and sports facilities.

More accurately, Paul S. Trible Jr., a former U.S. senator who became CNU president in 1996, has been reinventing the school to fit a vision he promoted from the moment he arrived.

"We set out to build a great university for Virginia and a great university for America," Trible said. "From day one, we said we reject the notion of incremental progress. We're in the business of dramatic transformation."

Trible insists his royal-sounding "we" is meant to give credit to the faculty, students, staff and community members who have lent a hand.

But most people, from those who applaud the new CNU to those who do not, say the makeover is a reflection of Trible's personal dream of what the school might become and his determination to make it come true.

Changes made over the past eight years already make the term "dramatic" something of an understatement.

Since the 1996-97 school year, the average SAT scores of incoming freshmen have risen nearly 200 points, from 960 to 1143. Applications have soared in the same period from 1,090 to 5,216, and the rate of applicants accepted for admission has dropped from 82 percent to 59 percent.

Thanks to a dizzying rush of dormitory and apartment construction, the number of residential students has climbed from 387 in 1996-97 to 2,436 this year.

Those dorms are part of a $300 million building program, due to be completed next year, that is bringing CNU a spectacular, $54 million performing arts center, an athletic and convocation center, a football stadium and an expanded library crowned by a 14-story "neo-Georgian" cupola.

But Trible said finishing all the construction and expanding the faculty won't in themselves bring him satisfaction. That will come, he said, "when CNU is known and respected as one of the pre-eminent liberal-arts schools in America."

. . .

The notion that CNU's calling was to become a relatively elite public university is not held universally.

To this day, some education experts say that schools such as the "old" CNU, with relatively open admissions and a selection of courses attractive to older and part-time "nontraditional" students from the local area, actually added diversity and accessibility to the state's higher-education system.

"Virginia used to have 'public ivies,' residential colleges and universities, and blue-collar, commuter colleges and universities," said Gordon K. Davies, a higher-education expert and former director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. "The state should worry that too many institutions are seeking to become prestigious by becoming selective."

That change, Davies said in an e-mail exchange, can reduce educational opportunities for large numbers of Virginians who don't fit the admission criteria for selective schools.

Some members of the Peninsula community including elected officials made similar arguments when Trible and the CNU Board of Visitors voted to eliminate CNU's undergraduate nursing, education and physical-education departments during a round of severe state-budget cutbacks in 2002.

The changes set off a heated debate about the school's responsibility to provide nurses and teachers for the community.

When that decision was announced, the Newport News City Council debated a resolution asking the school to reconsider but deadlocked in a 3-3 vote. Later, a local hospital expanded its nursing school, and CNU adopted a program that would let students with ambitions to teach earn a master's in education degree by attending a fifth year of college.

In the end, eliminating three professional programs and cutting more than 40 teaching positions to cope with budget cuts may have well helped speed CNU toward its goal of enhancing its liberal-arts curriculum.

With the budget situation now improved by tuition and fee increases and a 60 percent reinstatement of state appropriations that had been cut, CNU has been able to create many new faculty positions in liberal arts and sciences.

. . .

Trible responds to his critics by saying radical change inevitably meets resistance.

"What amazes me is that we've received so much support," he said. "I'm amazed there's not been more opposition."

While CNU may have occupied a niche as a local, blue-collar college when he arrived, Trible said the school had been losing enrollment for a decade as nontraditional students opted to take classes at community colleges or the nearby branches of schools such as Averett University and Saint Leo College that tailor classes to working students or members of the armed forces.

He pointed out that CNU was created as a two-year branch campus of the College of William and Mary, and always held its central missions to be providing a liberal-arts education.

"In truth," he said, "what we did is return to our roots."

. . .

A decade ago, CNU held a place of pride among high school guidance counselors as a great college for students "who had not done what they needed to do in high school, but we knew they were college material," said Mark Wilson, director of guidance at York County's Bruton High School. "CNU was the place they would go to fulfill that potential."

But students now generally need at least a B grade average to be accepted, so CNU has moved to a different niche and surrendered its old role to the state's two-year community colleges.

Wilson said Trible informed local guidance counselors of his plans for change soon after arriving, and has kept them updated with annual lunch or breakfast receptions.

"We felt like we were part of the transformation," Wilson said, adding that Trible's results have been impressive, judging from reports he gets from former students.

"He's created a private-school atmosphere at a public school."

. . .

Although CNU is one of Virginia's 15 public four-year colleges and universities, the state's decentralized higher-education system gives its board of visitors, whose members are appointed by the governor, power to independently set or change the school's educational mission and admission standards.

At James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Ronald E. Carrier famously tripled faculty and enrollment and put up more than 20 buildings during his presidency from 1971 to 1998.

Trible, 58, a Republican who was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1982 and retired after a single term when he was challenged by Democrat Charles S. Robb, came to the job at CNU with a network of influential friends and much practical experience.

He has attracted support for the school both in private donations and in substantial local-government subsidies toward construction of the new arts center.

. . .

With its massive rebuilding plan that includes a drastic rerouting of its main entrance road, CNU's transformation is also changing the face of what might be called the museum district of Newport News.

The college's new entry road, due for completion next month, will tie into the tree-lined drive that leads to the nearby Mariners' Museum and Peninsula Fine Arts Center. The main road that runs in front of the new arts and athletic centers, Warwick Boulevard, will be widened in the next few years from four lanes to six.

Old buildings that used to line Warwick are being torn down, and a new complex of shops and apartment housing for upperclassmen, CNU Village, is taking shape across Warwick from the main campus.

On a recent day this fall, students strolled in and out of a new dorm still surrounded by bare dirt. The school's executive vice president, William L. Brauer, who is overseeing the construction, said the lawn would appear one day soon after a quick application of sod.

"We don't have time for the grass to grow," he joked.

. . .

Students are not complaining about the construction. Instead, they brag about their school's amenities, and those that are soon to come.

"The facilities are awesome," said Charles Fairbanks, a freshman from Hanover County.

As a senior last year at Patrick Henry High School, Fairbanks heard only good things about CNU from older friends who had gone there, he said. He visited campus, found it "welcoming" and picked the Newport News college from among public-college acceptances that included Longwood and Radford universities.

Fairbanks said he was most attracted by the school's welcoming atmosphere, but he was also enticed by dorms that are fully carpeted and permit residents to share bathrooms with only three other students "instead of a whole floor."

"You get a fridge [and] a microwave," he added. "It's just awesome."

Fairbanks, who hopes to major in biology, plays trombone in the new marching band that started this year. When practices started in August, he was pleased that Trible showed up regularly to give the musicians pep talks and that the college president waved from his office window whenever they marched by.

"He's into school life," Fairbanks said. "He's very into it."