Professor Anatoly V. Oleksiyenko’s scholarship and teaching primarily examine the challenges of globalisation and transformation of universities and higher learning. Educated and raised in Ukraine, Professor Oleksiyenko is a world-leading critic of post-Soviet academia and contributor to the re-conceptualisation of governance and leadership in transforming university systems.  

Professor Oleksiyenko’s research paper “On the Shoulders of Giants? Global Science, Resource Asymmetries, and Repositioning of Research Universities in China and Russia” received the Comparative and International Education Society’s (CIES) Higher Education Special Interest Group’s Best Article Award in 2016. His book Global Mobility and Higher Learning won the Best Book Award from the CIES Study Abroad and International Student Special Interest Group in 2019. He has earned international accolades for a number of co-edited volumes and special issues, including International Status Anxiety and Higher Education: The Soviet Legacy in China and Russia, Higher Education and Human Vulnerability: Global Failures of Corporate Design, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Teach, Freedom to Learn: The Crisis of Higher Education in the Post-Truth Era, and Academic Freedom in the Reimagined Post-Humboldtian Europe.

Professor Oleksiyenko obtained his PhD from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, where he managed an international portfolio and explored disparate developmental contexts of global academia, including in China, Cambodia, Georgia, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, among others. Later, he did research in these countries and published papers in influential journals of higher education. 

Professor Oleksiyenko served on the management boards of the CIES Higher Education Special Interest Group and the Association for the Study of Higher Education’s Council of International Higher Education, the advisory board of The Legatum Institute and spearheaded analytical insights on education for their Prosperity Index development, and was the Director of Comparative Education Research Centre at The University of Hong Kong. He has also played a major role in developing communities of higher education research in Hong Kong and Ukraine by designing and chairing webinars, and leading editorial teams in local and international journals, such as Cogent Education, Journal of Comparative and International Higher Education, Academic Praxis, Universities and Intellectuals. Professor Oleksiyenko has advised numerous international agencies such as UNESCO and the Open Society Foundations on education development projects, and has provided periodic commentary on international education to Times Higher Education.