University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell reaches out to community and corporations

The new man running the University of Melbourne is a square-set, no-nonsense, rugby type, who is equally at home with microbes and music, writes Andrew Rule.

Professor Maskell says a university should be an engine of discovery. Picture: Mark Stewart

When Duncan Maskell was a schoolboy in suburban North London he followed three football codes but played only one.

“Rugby union,” he says, deadpan: “As you can tell from my morphology.”

That, in 10 words or less, tells a lot about the new man running the University of Melbourne. He is a square-set, no-nonsense, rugby type — a scientist by training, academic administrator by choice, a man at ease with Latin roots and formal textbook terminology. And an expert on microbes and Test cricket, it turns out.

His CV makes our new vice-chancellor sound like a formidable Scrabble opponent — which he no doubt would be, if only he had time. With the quick mind and pithy turn of phrase comes sardonic humour.

For instance, he calls university league table rankings “venerated algorithms”. Of course, he completely understands that one of his responsibilities is to keep Melbourne Uni’s foothold high on the league ladder, but there’s more to the job than that.

The brief he has set himself is to build bridges in the general community and partnerships with the corporate world — all while making sure the 52,000 full time students and 17,000 part-timers get the best education possible. An astonishing 20,000-plus of these are overseas students, whose fees underwrite the funding of most Australian universities.

Professor Maskell takes part in a ceremony during National Reconciliation Week at the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development. Picture: Drew Echberg

The image is of a ring master running a three-ring circus. The trick is to make it look easy.

The new man in the big office overlooking the Parkville campus has spent most of his adult life at Cambridge University but he’s no cartoon Oxbridge don. Brain doesn’t mean vain. He’s not big on bow ties and brogues or Brideshead Revisited revisited.

Maskell’s doctoral thesis was on resistance to salmonella, to help find vaccines to fight typhoid. An interest that took him to pig farms in rural Myanmar to study the links between pig and human diseases. This tells you something.

AN EARLY TEST

Duncan John Maskell is a plumber’s son who played clarinet and saxophone well enough to play jazz at the Edinburgh Festival. He also played in a rock band that supported Elvis Costello and Bob Geldof’s Boomtown Rats in the 1980s.

Not that he didn’t like Mondays. The young microbiologist would rise to the top of the academic pile through natural energy and fierce application. But long before he got to Cambridge, music helped shape a life of relentless achievement.

The defining experience of his childhood was to sing a solo part to a packed house at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall to celebrate the 60th birthday of the composer Benjamin Britten. He was 11, on stage in front of more VIPs than he’d ever seen in one place.

After surviving that, he says, “nothing else has ever seemed as daunting”. It steeled his nerve for any sort of performance — a lesson in how an early accomplishment, in his case musical, can boost confidence to tackle almost anything.

LOVE OF SPORT

Music still matters to Maskell but it slipped down a rung as he got serious about microbiology and the quest for knowledge — for its own sake and, he adds, for the good of humanity.

After holding senior positions at Oxford and elsewhere he returned to Cambridge as a tenured professor and administrator for two decades before taking the call that lured him to Melbourne last spring.

It’s a safe guess that love of sport is one of the things that persuaded him to chance his arm.

He clearly remembers his first visit to Australia in 1994: he landed on Boxing Day, got to the Test match at the MCG next day and the Sydney Test the following week. The England team was blown apart by Slater and Taylor’s “magnificent batting”, he recalls with the grim pleasure of the cricket purist.

He arrived too late last year for the AFL finals but got to the races at Flemington a few days later to indulge his other sporting passion.

ART OF INCLUSION

A new red Sherrin sits on a bookshelf behind him. The football is not just a nod to quaint local customs: he actually watched Australian Rules on television every weekend as a schoolboy and fell for it. His favourite code, unsurprisingly, is the round ball game — in his case, the Manchester United variety.

Once here, he ignored overtures from other teams and settled for the university’s “local” AFL team, Carlton, on the optimistic grounds the Blues can only improve. He has been to meet his opposite number at the AFL, former Uni Blues ruckman Gillon McLachlan, one of a list of corporate leaders the university needs on side to do business with Business.

“The big end of town” holds no fears for Maskell. His idea of a modern university seems as pragmatic as it is progressive. He is keen for industry to see benefits in sponsoring research and development. But he is just as attentive to concerns about gender, inclusiveness, diversity and indigenous and multicultural sensitivities.

In the complex new world where social media amplify the views of articulate minorities, universities like to do the correct things: in his first six months Maskell has reached out to a rainbow coalition of the diverse groups involved in university life.

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

Elite sport gives him a break from a demanding job but Maskell doesn’t see it as a template for elite education. Top-level sport (like business) is necessarily competitive but he believes universities should co-operate, not compete.

From this distance he can look back clearly at the working-class boy who made his way by nailing every exam since his early days at a North London school. When his teachers nudged him towards university, it meant fulfilling a family ambition denied his father, who had left school at 14 because the family could not afford the uniform.

That hunger for education — and appreciation of it — underpinned the rise of the man who has come from one of the world’s greatest universities to steer another. If the Melbourne appointment is not the crowning achievement of a brilliant career, it’s close.

“My grandparents lived in a two-up, two-down with an outside bog and a tin bath,” says Maskell. He doesn’t have to labour the point that achievement is measured by where you start from as much as where you finish.

He is sitting across the big table in his airy office — complete with private bathroom in the corner — that covers the width of the Raymond Priestley building, a 1960s cream brick special that might end up on the university’s “To Do” list for refurbishment or replacement.

The view takes in the entire Parkville campus, some nearby buildings the university already owns, and some it might soon own if certain deals are finalised.

Professor Maskell attending his first Anzac Day ceremony in April.

Beyond the naked eye, but not the vice-chancellor’s vision, are far-flung parts of the university’s new territories — notably (but not only) seven hectares of the giant General Motors-Holden site at Fishermans Bend.

Then there is the new Conservatorium of Music, the Ian Potter Centre and the Melbourne Theatre Company and art spaces in the old police stables, all at Southbank. There’s a big project at the old Royal Women’s Hospital site in Carlton. And country properties at Dookie and elsewhere.

CAN-DO ENERGY

Fishermans Bend is the heart of a scheme for the university to help turn a bleak industrial district into a showpiece suburb. Maskell is backing the plan to set up the Melbourne School of Engineering there.

He ducks being cast as only a practical and pragmatic administrator — “I think about the abstract as well” he protests — but he has about him the “can-do” energy of the builder, without which dreams wither and vanish.

Stand by, then, for a steady evolution of the university. From a new student precinct opening onto Swanston St to the building (or re-purposing) of more accommodation so many more students can stay on or near campus, something closer to the way universities operate in Europe.

LESSONS OF SCIENCE

Maskell quit test tubes, Petri dishes and laboratories a while ago, but the lessons of science have not left him. His mentor, perhaps even hero, was a Uruguayan-born scientist, Carlos Hormaeche, “an inspirational chap … he taught me to be a scientist at the top level”.

Hormaeche taught the young Englishman never to cut corners, even if doing an experiment perfectly meant working until midnight. (It helps that his wife Sarah is also a dedicated scientist.)

It’s an attitude about excellence that the best teachers and coaches manage to plant in their pupils’ minds. If Melbourne University can do that for as many people as possible, Maskell implies, he will be happy.

“A university should be an engine of discovery,” he says. “It can spark industry — or pursue knowledge for its own sake.”

But a modern university cannot be cut off from the communities it serves, especially from businesses willing to invest in “cloud seeding” to encourage research and development by the best and brightest minds. A microbiologist such as Maskell might call it a symbiotic relationship between learning and earning.

He doesn’t get much time to practise sax or clarinet these days. But his colleagues say he has a remarkable memory for all forms of music, including the rock and pop hits of his youth.

Some of those, of course, were by the Canadian supergroup Bachman Turner Overdrive, whose big songs were Takin’ Care of Business and You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.

That’s Duncan Maskell. Working overtime, taking care of business. Maybe we ain’t seen nothing yet.

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