Alan Gilbert

Alan David Gilbert AO (11 September 1944 – 27 July 2010) was an Australian historian and academic administrator who was until June 2010 the president and vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester. During his tenure (1996–2004) as vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, he pushed for and established Melbourne University Private, a private university offshoot which ultimately failed. This, and his well-known controversial views on private funding of universities, led to Richard Davis in 2002 dubbing him the "doyen of economically rationalist vice-chancellors". Early academic career Gilbert graduated with a first class BA at the Australian National University in 1965, then took an MA in history and took a post as lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea in 1967. He gained a scholarship at Nuffield College, Oxford and he was awarded a DPhil in 1973. He returned to Australia as a lecturer at the University of New South Wales, where he established an academic reputation as an historian working in the social, socio-economic and religious history of modern Britain and Australia.