At night, the lighted cupola of a new library shines from the center of Christopher Newport University, beckoning all who see it into campus life.

Paul Trible – the former three-term congressional representative and U.S. senator from Virginia for whom the library is named – lights up, too, when he talks about the institution whose presidency he calls the most important task of his career.

After walking the halls of the U.S. Capitol and taking on other impressive but short-term roles such as delegate to the United Nations – a series of experiences he sums up by joking, “I’m a man who hasn’t been able to hold a job for more than six years” – Trible now is right where he wants to be.

Ask him to tell you about himself, and he’ll tell you instead the story of his university – a place that has imprinted itself on Trible during 13 years there, in much the same way that his name now has been chiseled onto that new library’s entrance.

“We have a critical mass of life and energy and spirit, and yet we’re small enough that we know our students by name,” he says of the 5,000-student, selective public school.

His presidency led to his current service as vice chair of the Division III Presidents Council, whose members he says share his hope “that in some small way we can contribute to the success of student-athletes on our campuses.”

He has been shaped by affiliations with several Division III member institutions – first as an undergraduate at Hampden-Sydney and law student at Washington and Lee, and now at Christopher Newport, where he says students in 22 sports understand “if it’s a choice of being late for football practice or completing a chemistry lab, you complete the chemistry lab and then give 100 percent in practice.”

Despite the joke about not being able to hold a job, Trible’s resume is the epitome of leadership and productivity. He held federal and state prosecutorial positions in Virginia before his election to Congress at age 29, representing the First District of Virginia. Six years later, he succeeded Harry Byrd in the Senate, but decided after one term not to seek re-election. Before assuming Christopher Newport’s presidency, he was a U.N. delegate and a teaching fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

He doesn’t mind if Christopher Newport students see that resume as a roadmap for their own aspirations. “There are too few people with big dreams in this day and age,” he says. But Trible, who attributes his own experiences to “extraordinary opportunities,” suggests that “a sense of responsibility for the world” is the greatest ambition.

“The world is not going to be shaped by great nation-states or powerful parliaments or mighty armies, but rather by each of us choosing to become involved in changing the world, one person at a time,” he says. “So when people ask me what I’m doing, I say I’m in the business of changing the world.”

Generations of young people, en route to putting their own mark on the world, will trek first through the Trible Library.

“The library overnight became the gathering place for the entire university community,” says Trible of the structure that honors not only Christopher Newport’s fifth president, but also his wife, Rosemary. “It is filled with students day and night. What pleases me is that our name forever will be etched in the life of this university that I love so much.”

For a man who once couldn’t stay in a job for more than a half-dozen years, forever truly is a long time.

Christopher Newport President Paul Trible’s influence is reflected in the campus library that bears his name. Photos courtesy of Christopher Newport/NCAA Photos