Rate My Professor Glyn Davis

Professor Glyn Davis AC is a public policy specialist and interim Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne. He previously served as Vice-Chancellor of the University from 2005 to 2018. Professor Davis holds a first-class honours degree in Political Science from the University of New South Wales and a PhD from the Australian National University. In 1988, he undertook post-doctoral studies as a Harkness Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, the Brookings Institution and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

His academic career began at Griffith University, where he joined as a lecturer in public policy and was appointed professor in 1998 before becoming Vice-Chancellor in 2002. Professor Davis is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2002. He is the author of The Australian Idea of a University (2017) and On Life’s Lottery (2021), and co-author of the Australian Policy Handbook. Professor Davis has held visiting professorial appointments at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford and the Policy Institute at King’s College London. He previously served as Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet from 2022 to 2025 and as Chief Executive Officer of the Paul Ramsay Foundation.