Anatoly V. Oleksiyenko – författare

This book explains why conflict between the institutional and human agencies is an unavoidable outcome of competing local, national and global agendas at a major research university. It illustrates this by means of a case-study of Glonacal U, a university which belongs to the category of exceptional institutions that excel due to an established organizational culture of academic freedom, research excellence, shared governance, and intellectual leadership. The book shows how such a university may succumb to anxiety when neoliberal managers seek to exploit stakeholder doubts about university sufficiency, relevance, and performance in national and global markets and hierarchies of knowledge products and status goods. As top-down pressure for strategic choices in scientific partnerships increases at the world-class university, grassroots resistance to centralization increases also in order to remind the research university leaders that intellectual work and academic freedom are interdependent and central to building capacities for impactful global science. Productive global linkages are prerogative of academics who take full responsibility for success of project implementation and outcomes in scholarship and practice.

This volume provides a critical perspective on the Soviet legacy of global competition and status anxiety in international higher education. Investigating tensions generated by the traditional power instruments of coercion, money and attraction, the book looks into the dynamics of multi-level forces that either advance progressive university policies and practices or lead to hyper-centralization, indoctrination and unfreedom of inquiry in higher education. The volume provides insights into political sources that champion the anxiety about superpower status over the agenda of social equality, fairness, and freedom in universities and their communities. The manuscript offers an excellent collation of studies shedding light on the phenomenon of de-Sovietization which was previously largely overlooked and underexplored in the higher education literature.

The book appeals to policy-makers, practitioners and scholars of higher education who seek to understand historical and political conditions that affect the currency of Chinese and Russian scholarship. As de-Sovietization of higher education may often be aspiration than reality in the two post-totalitarian countries, this books offers a unique, thought-provoking frame of analysis urging for more studies in the area as well as encouraging enhanced responsibility in creating sufficient room for freedom of critical inquiry.