Glyn Davis leaves Melbourne Uni in great shape

In his time as vice-chancellor, Glyn Davis as made Melbourne unquestionably Australia’s top university.

Glyn Davis leaves the University of Melbourne this week after nearly 14 years as vice-chancellor. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

This Friday the doyen of Australia’s vice-chancellors, Glyn Davis, steps away from the University of Melbourne after nearly 14 years in charge.

“It’s been an extraordinary vice-chancellorship both in what he’s achieved and the respect and affection in which he is held,” says Peter McPhee, who previously held the university’s No 2 position of provost under Davis.

In his time as vice-chancellor he has made the institution unquestionably Australia’s top university, standing head and shoulders above every other in the two international rankings — the Academic Ranking of World Universities and Times Higher Education — that count most.

Melbourne is also now a powerhouse of university fundraising, and is on its way to raising $1 billion in its current campaign due to end in 2021.

Davis has also made himself Australia’s foremost higher education change agent, successfully introducing a new degree structure — the Melbourne Model — in which the standard pattern for every student is a general undergraduate degree followed by a more specialist masters.

For nearly two decades he has been a leading thinker about higher education, his most recent contribution being his book The Australian Idea of a University, published last year.

And his reputation is not confined to Australia. Along the way, while at Melbourne, he was approached to put his hat in the ring for the vice-chancellorship of ­Oxford. He politely declined.

Right now the vice-chancellorship is not the only thing coming to an end in his life. Always a keen musician, he has joined a band whenever he could in his career. He was once a member, at Griffith University, of a group called the Chancellors of Vice.

He describes the most recent band he belonged to, also university based, as “vaguely jazz fusion, jazz blues (with) entirely original material written by the band and done for our own amusement”. It was called Professors’ Walk, which happens to be a pedestrian thoroughfare at the University of Melbourne, and also referred to its members, who were just that — professors, mainly in music.

“They were actually really good (players) and you had to keep up with them,” says Davis, who plays clarinet and guitar.

Professors’ Walk played its last gig two months ago, not because Davis is leaving but because its leader is moving away.

His departure from Melbourne also brings to a close a remarkable double act whose parallel would be difficult to find anywhere: Davis and his wife, Margaret Gardner, each head one of Melbourne’s major universities.

Gardner’s term as Monash vice-chancellor, which started in 2014, lasts until at least 2024. Before that she was the head of RMIT University, which is just down the road from the University of Melbourne.

Davis arrived in the job at Melbourne at the beginning of 2005: at 45, he was one of Australia’s youngest university chiefs.

He had already spent nearly three years as the vice-chancellor of Griffith University in Queensland and before that had a four-year stint as head of the Queensland Premier’s Department, serving Labor premier Peter Beattie, who had tapped him for the top public service role when he won office in 1998.

Prior to that, Davis had headed the Queensland Cabinet Office for the last years of Wayne Goss’s Labor government in 1995-96, working with then Premier’s Department head Kevin Rudd.

Before that he had served as public sector equity commissioner with Queensland’s Public Sector Management Commission from 1990 to 1993, in the early years of the Goss government.

Between his bureaucratic jobs he was a political scientist at Griffith, a rare academic who successfully advanced his career in academe as well as in the public service.

It culminated in him reaching the top of both: as the state’s most senior public servant, then returning to Griffith as vice-chancellor.

Davis is at once a political creature and not a political creature.

He is softly spoken, unfailingly polite, always considerate — “he doesn’t blow his own trumpet”, says McPhee.

But he has also mixed it in the toughest of games, usually with success. And while favoured by the ALP, he did not end up carrying the Labor label.

Davis comes from a family of journalists. His father, Pedr, who is still writing, was a freelance ­motoring journalist with a weekly column that appeared in over 100 regional newspapers. Davis remembers helping him print his column on Sundays under their house in Sydney’s southern suburbs, and posting a copy to all the subscribing newspapers. His mother, Dolores, occasionally wrote for Choice magazine. Davis has two younger brothers: Tony a motoring journalist like his father, and Damian, a TV producer.

In the early 1980s, having just completed his PhD at the Australian National University, Davis had three months to spare before commencing the job he had been offered as a lecturer at Griffith University. He was short of money and had nothing to fall back on, but heard that the ABC local bureau in Canberra needed journalists. He says he dropped in at the newsroom and told the bureau chief he was available.

“He said, ‘When can you start?’ I said, ‘Anytime.’ He said, ‘How about now?’ ”

Davis did the shift and they kept inviting him back. The highlight? “I got to cover the opening of the Big Merino at Goulburn.” He parted ways with the ABC on good terms. They knew he was going to a job at Griffith, and on his last day the bureau chief queried him: “You hadn’t done this before, had you?”

That was Davis’s last job in the family business. Now that he has finished at the University of Melbourne he will return to ANU, where he did his PhD, with an appointment at the Crawford School of Public Policy. He will also be a visiting professor at King’s College London as well as at the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford.

For the moment, Davis’s future plans appear not to include any big management roles that would draw on his extensive experience. That’s unfortunate because his expertise and his style as a leader draw strong praise from former colleagues at the University of Melbourne.

Grattan Institute’s higher education expert Andrew Norton, who worked for Davis on policy ­issues in his early period as vice-chancellor, says he treats everyone with respect. “He would treat everyone, from the receptionist to the prime minister, in the same way,” he says.

Ian Marshman, for years the university’s senior vice-principal (akin to a chief operating officer), says Davis offered those he worked with a real sense of partnership. “He’s the quintessential low-ego chief executive.”

His style was effective in bringing about major change in the university. McPhee says Davis’s leadership was “very adept” in its breadth of consultation.

“People don’t feel change is being imposed upon them,” he says. “He appoints key people to areas of responsibility and then backs them. He doesn’t give the impression of a powerful individual who is pulling the strings.”

Another former provost, Margaret Sheil, who is now vice-chancellor of Queensland University of Technology, agrees.

“He had a commitment and a sense of purpose that inspired you to follow,” she says. “He was unbelievably diligent about getting back to you and following up.”

That’s the Davis recipe for leadership. If he doesn’t practise it himself again, maybe it will inspire others.