Doctrina perpetua—translated variously as “forever learning” (Cryle, 1992, p. 27), “lifelong
learning” and “lifelong education”—is the Latin motto of Central Queensland University (CQU), an
Australian regional university with campuses in Central Queensland and the metropolitan and
provincial cities of Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Melbourne and Sydney and with centres in China, Fiji,
Hong Kong and Singapore.
During its early development the institution was small and regional; in many ways it was an
institution at the margins of higher education. For only a third of its 40-year life has it been recognised
as a university. However, the vision of both its founders and its continuing staff has been that of an
institution that actively brokers change, promotes innovation and seeks to transform marginalisation—
for students, for its community and for itself. Its short life on the edge of the universe of higher
education has promoted a culture of innovation and an acceptance that change is a necessary and
positive aspect of life on the edge. Embracing change, CQU has become a complex institution, a notion
well expressed in a speech in August 1999 by former Vice-Chancellor Lauchlan Chipman on Visioning
Our Future:
I have often remarked that I do not see CQU as “the last university of the old
millennium” but rather as “the first university of the new millennium”. One of our
greatest strengths in making the transition is our relative immaturity as a university. The
more mature a university, especially if it is successful, the less agile it is when it comes
to the need to change. So far as the future of universities and change is concerned, my
position is unequivocally Heraclitean: change is the only thing that is permanent.
Applying to itself the motto “doctrina perpetua” over its short life, the agile University has become
a “complex and diverse organisation” (Danaher, Harreveld, Luck & Nouwens, 2004, p. 13). This
overview of CQU seeks to provide readers with a short description of the current state of the institution
and the story of its development to provide a context for understanding the chapters that follow, and to
assist readers to reflect on how these developments at CQU relate to higher education generally, and to
the universities with which they are more familiar
