University of Melbourne’s Glyn Davis talks leadership

Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Melbourne Professor Glyn Davis talks leadership.

Professor Glyn Davis, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Melbourne, talks about leadership with Alan Kohler.

ALAN KOHLER: Do you feel like the CEO of a business? Or are you the first among academic equals?

GLYN DAVIS: I don’t feel like a CEO. I can’t order things around the way a CEO would do. There’s a collegial governance that’s inherent in a university. But it is a CEO role in the sense that you’ve got to provide leadership. You’ve got to ensure the finances work. You’ve got to be out there explaining the institution to the public. It has a set of roles that would be completely familiar to a business CEO.

AK: Do you think you’d be able to be a company CEO?

GD: I assume many of the skills are the same. But it sounds arrogant to assume skills learned in one sector are easily ported over to another.

AK: Not long after you arrived you introduced what is now called the Melbourne Curriculum, replacing the university’s 96 undergraduate courses with six undergraduate degrees and professional programs. It was highly controversial and you were criticised for being too commercial. It was certainly revolutionary. How much pressure were you under?

GD: If you’re going to make a very big change as a leader, you make it in your first year. That’s a really important part of leading any organisation. Your honeymoon doesn’t last long. I was very clear upfront about what I wanted to do.

AK: Did you come with the plan formed?

GD: I came with a sense of what I’d like to do but without the detail, knowing I’d spend a year testing it. In my 20s I worked at American universities; my aspiration was to bring that quality of education here.

AK: Do you think you succeeded?

GD: We’re now the most highly ranked university in the country, the most difficult to get in to. Half of the international students who apply to any university in Victoria apply here. So it’s found a market. But we always understood it wasn’t for everybody.

AK: How did you take people with you? That must have been a big, persuasive effort.

GD: The first six months were spent listening,

taking the temperature, with a more structured consultation in the second half of the year. That resulted in a paper setting out the vision. In the second year, a commission worked through the detail with 25 people drawn from across the university. At the end of the second year, it went to the governing body, the council. But importantly it also went to the academic board. We had the largest academic board meeting I had ever seen, hundreds of people. They voted unanimously in favour. The implementation year was the toughest of the three. Everyone can see the cost of change, but the benefits are somewhere in the future. We started the new model in the first semester of 2008. The sense of excitement on campus stays with me.

AK: The Growing Esteem strategic plan you initiated has still got some way to go – last year it was extended to 2020.

GD: Universities have very long lives. The project I’m working on is a very small part of a very big picture and the university will go on to develop different strategies over time. This is a three-phase strategy. The first phase was to offer a really superb, global standard teaching model to our 50,000 students. We’ve done that. The second part was to make sure we’re one of the world’s top 50 universities in terms of research impact, and we’ve done that. We’re rated number 44 on the research rankings now, up from number 92 when we started. The third part is about engagement. Once, there was a vision of universities as enclosed worlds, separate, autonomous, cut off. But universities are now integral parts of the society – much more engaged on all aspects. IBM has a research laboratory at the University of Melbourne and pharmaceutical company CSL has its research headquarters here. So there’s a lot of activity where industry puts its researchers alongside our researchers.

AK: Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had a go at you on that subject recently.

GD: He was reflecting a critique that academics are somehow still unworldly and don’t do research that has commercial or social impact. I was challenging the evidence. There’s not much difference between the academics we have at Melbourne, or anywhere in Australia, and those in the UK and the US.

AK: Are you unworldly?

GD: We’re an employer of nearly 9000 people with an annual budget of more than $2 billion. The industry that we’re part of, higher education, is the largest export industry in Victoria and together we’re the largest employers in Victoria. We’re very firmly part of the world. If we were a private company rather than a university, we’d be in the ASX top 100. We control $6 billion worth of assets, roughly. That’s a big operation in anyone’s terms. So yes, the senior team here have to understand our place in that world. But we are an education institution. In the first instance we’re here to produce great graduates who’ll go and make a big difference in the world.