The Bradley Review of Higher Education had prosacic terms of reference. But it had one one matter of principle to address. The Rudd Government's brief included a focus on social inclusion, specifically on supporting and widening access to higher education, including participation by students from a wide range of backgrounds.
The resulting Bradley Report is caught between discontent with the inequities of the system and fatalism about what prevents Australian universities from doing better for students from marginalised backgrounds.
It sets a bold target of 20 per cent of students coming from a low socio-economic background by 2020. Yet the specific recommendations regarding social inclusion equivocate between bucking and merely tweaking the elements of a system which, the Report itself admits, has not worked.
The Report airs the dirty little secret that changes to Australian higher education over recent decades have done little to change the profile of those who participate. Neither the abolition of tertiary fees nor, conversely, the introduction of the HECS scheme has made a significant impact.
Yet despite its own critique, the Bradley Report focuses on issues such as adjustment of the existing failed income support systems. Although programs such as Austudy and Abstudy have certainly become less and less effective, the recommendations will only restore a system unable, even at its earliest or best, to change the profile of Australian student populations.
This failure, if it is fair to call it that, might lie in what the Report and its terms of reference did not ask: whether our crowded and under-resourced campuses are themselves really capable of achieving social inclusion, or whether they have become mechanisms for the Darwinian triumph of the already-privileged.
Although the Australian universities of the past were elite institutions, they were also places where students might be formed through inspiration, challenge and the building of relationships with mentors and peers. They were small enough, or at least sufficiently well-resourced, for such relationships to be possible. Their most shining moments, inside and outside classrooms, happened when knowledge was catalysed by community.
If the reality of the university as a community of scholars was once taken for granted, it was left behind in a rush to expansion we must now view ambivalently. Growth in university places theoretically gave access to a larger, and hence more diverse, group of students. But what they had access to has itself changed more than the profile of those who have come.
As a result we have all the university places we need for relatively privileged students who can survive in the mega-university. But the under-privileged find their own exclusion has gone unscathed or even been reinforced. Once desirable but exclusive venues now risk being theoretically accessible but uninspiring places. Though they impart knowledge and skills competently, they ultimately confirm existing capacities without creating new ones.
A bleak and bland consensus about the social vocation of higher education has been common to both sides of politics for a long time. Although the Howard Government's recent neglect of university funding may have been a bad example, it was not unique.
The Dawkins reforms are sometimes too simplistically condemned without acknowledgment of their genuinely mixed legacy. But they, like the more active and quite gratuitous VSU agenda of late, undermined the capacity of Australian universities to be places where students could acquire something more profound than vocational skills and have outstanding rather than merely acceptable experiences.
To address the wide funding shortfall, which Bradley recommends and which Minister for Education Julia Gillard must address, will only take us to the point where we must ask more profound questions about inclusion. The Report raises few of these questions. Its one genuinely revolutionary possibility may lie in its recommendation that funding should follow students to whichever public or private institution attracts them.
This prospect may leave some aghast, and others predicting further rationalization and economies of scale. Yet in a more diverse educational economy, someone may ask again how a university education could be both inclusive and transformative.
A renewed emphasis on community and pedagogy would be expensive, would certainly have to involve private as well as public funding, and would not be the desired or necessary path for every Australian tertiary student. Yet with greater room for differentiation and choice, some institutions might construct new and different forms of educational experience to engage and support highly capable students from more diverse backgrounds, equipping them for Australia's and the world's challenging future.
Recovering the possibility that university education will be transformative, and that community may be a means to this end, would be the most revolutionary thing this reform could bring.
About the author: Andrew McGowan is Warden of Trinity College at the University of Melbourne and teaches in the United Faculty of Theology.
On the Web: http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=11555
Education
Higher Education's Dirty Little Secret
By: Andrew McGowan
Wednesday, 18 February 2009, 15:11 (EST)
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