Jason Koutsoukis’ In like Glyn in The Monthly, November 2024, provides an excellent insight into the person of Professor Glyn Davis and the better politics.
I worked for Professor Glyn Davis in Office of Vice-Chancellor, The University of Melbourne, during the planning and implementation of the Melbourne Model. Professor Davis is a brilliant thinker. There are several points in Koutsoukis’ articles which shows the brilliant thinking and better politics, and overlaps the thinking of Glyn and myself: common understanding from Queensland and the United States, framing from planned moderate progressivism, and a passion for the humanities and the social sciences, and a hope that Australia can resisted the Trumpian influences.
- Although Glyn Davis came out of New South Wales, he is “a thinking Queenslander” in his roles for Queensland recent past;
- Davis had post-doctoral appointments as a Harkness Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, the Brookings Institution in Washington DC and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. I had personal conversations with my boss our our separate times in the United States. I remember one story. I had studied philosophy at Melbourne at the time, and Glyn told me that while in the States he took the opportunity to study Aristotle. I was impressed;
- The Melbourne Model is an example of a planned moderate progressivism coming straight out of the philosophy of Aristotle, interpreted by the arguments of contemporary philosophy;
- Koutsoukis picks up Davis’ passion for the humanities and the social sciences:
- “What is he thinking about? …A line of verse that caught his eye while browsing the poetry section at Readings bookstore in Melbourne? A Sydney art exhibition he dare not miss? Any one of a number of pieces he has promised to Australian Book Review or Meanjin? The latest Tom Stoppard play? His grandson? Such is the breadth of Davis’s passions and intellectual curiosity that all of the above are possible.”
- “Then under the spell of his first mentor, the famous Australian public intellectual Donald Horne, Davis must surely have been tempted by the cycle of observation, speculation and prolific writing that marked Horne’s own life in journalism.”
- “…the character named Horne in Frank Moorhouse’s 1976 novella Conference-ville, to ‘miss nothing and take one of everything”.’
- “The thinking and the journey are one.”
- “At Marist, Glyn leant hard into the humanities. Less interested in sport than his brothers, he took up classical guitar and, later, the clarinet.”
- “…It was there, in the political science department, that he first encountered Horne…”
- “By the time Davis was finishing his honours thesis in 1981, a dissertation on the fledgling radio station 2JJ (set up by the Whitlam government to extend the appeal of the ABC to younger audiences), he was an occasional guest at Horne’s Woollahra terrace, where the precocious undergraduate would dazzle other guests with the depth of his reading on abstruse topics such as French philosopher Michel Foucault’s analysis of power.”
- “Davis wrote later in The Craft of Governing: The contribution of Patrick Weller to Australian political science.”
- “Armed with his doctorate, Davis immediately took up a position in the public policy program at Griffith University in Brisbane at the beginning of 1985.”
I obtained my doctorate at the University of Queensland in 1995. I was first employed as a full-time contract with Professor Roy Webb of Griffith University, and then permanently by Professor Alan Gilbert of the University of Melbourne, and was kept on in the position of Research Officer by Professor Davis. I resigned in late 2009 from the position, due to the deep desire of my (now late) wife, Ruth Elizabeth Buch (nee Lohmann), for the family to return to Brisbane, Queensland. There was another reason for the resignation. I want to do the work I am doing now. Pity, that I am not paid
No, It is shameful that I am not paid. Another Aristotelian concept interpreted in modernity.
Featured Image: Dr Neville Buch, Research Officer, Office of Vice-Chancellor, The University of Melbourne.
Neville Buch
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