The University of New England was established to provide higher education to people socially and geographically outside the conventions of metropolitan universities.

Always slightly apart from other universities, UNE has cut its own path in order to help its students gain the knowledge they need to navigate a changing world.

As a pioneering provider of distance education, it broke down the walls of the campus and rebuilt the educational enterprise on the premise that an external degree could be taught with the same rigour as one delivered on-campus.

Even after this model had proven successful for a decade, UNE’s first Vice-Chancellor, Dr Robert Madgwick, had to fight the Australian Universities Commission when it tried to separate distance education from universities in the mid-1960s.

Madgwick was a formative influence on UNE, and through his championing of distance education, on Australia’s higher education sector in general.

From the first, Madgwick signalled his determination to shape the University’s education and research on behalf of those who use it, not those who deliver it.

Educated at the universities of Sydney and Oxford, Madgwick had also seen the power of education at work outside the university environment.

As a young man, he worked as a country schoolteacher. In the late 1930s he delivered the University of Sydney’s adult education program throughout rural NSW, and that experience led to him becoming Director of the Australian Army’s education program in the Second World War, charged with educating soldiers so they could return to a changed post-war Australia as engaged, employable citizens.

These experiences, he later recalled, gave him a straightforward perspective on his job as an educator: it was to “…find out what people want, give it to them, and go on from there … and never take the easy way and start with what I think they need”.

Madgwick’s unusually broad outlook on education extended to who had access to it.

“I believe,” he said, “… that a university education should be available in a democratic society to all who can benefit from it, and further, that we cannot as a nation, waste our educational potential by leaving untrained and uneducated to the highest level, men and women who are willing to subject themselves to the personal and intellectual discipline which is essential in external students.”

Madgwick also understood the need to retrain to adapt to a changing work environment, even at a time when jobs were for life. Observing in the 1930s that the theories he taught as a lecturer in economic analysis at University of Sydney had been superseded, he switched his teaching to economic history.

When he took the reins of Australia’s first regional university in 1954, Madgwick reflected that, “…we have an unexcelled opportunity to make a contribution to University thought and practice in the 20th Century, because we are new and because our traditions are not yet formally established…”

UNE is no longer new, but it remains free of the encrustations of tradition that freight older, larger universities.

Instead, true to Madgwick’s democratic ideas on education, UNE’s tradition is to look outward, to support those who want to adapt to a world constantly changing around them.

This focus on students, and recognising its students as individuals with individual needs, has ensured that UNE has earned the maximum five-star rating for “overall student experience” in the annual Good Universities Guide rankings for 12 years running.

UNE’s student support begins at the beginning. The University provides options to help all prospective students, whatever their background or circumstances in life, a pathway into higher education should they have the capacity and determination for study.

Recognising the accelerating change occurring in the workplace, UNE has also taken pioneering steps to unbundle learning from the business of getting a degree. “Bespoke courses” allow students to select just those elements of degree courses that they need to thrive in the workplace — or any other place — and to mix-and-match bespoke courses across disciplines.

While studying, UNE provides external students with a distance teaching program honed over 60 years — no other university in the world has this depth of experience in distance education — supported by an award-winning Information Technology (IT) infrastructure.

In 2017, UNE introduced the last step in its delivery of online education: online exams, which are being progressively rolled out through 2018.

Because of its origins and outlook, UNE has become an agent of transformation, changing for the better the lives of individuals, communities (whether they are bound by geography, culture or practice) and humanity’s relationship to the planet.

The 21st Century is full of noise, through which UNE sends a clear, strong signal: if you wish to educate yourself to thrive in a changing world, then whatever your circumstances, the University will support you.