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