[7] D’Anieri presciently brought to readers’ attention the activity in Ukraine of the US political consultant Paul Manafort in a chapter published in 2013, (“Autocratic Diffusion and the Pluralization of Democracy,” in Power in a Complex Global System edited by Louis W. Pauly, Bruce W. Jentleson, p. 87) In the fall of 2017, he served as the Eugene and Daymel Shklar Research Fellow at Harvard University, where he conducted research for a book tentatively titled “From ‘Civilized Divorce’ to Uncivil War: Russia, Ukraine, and the West, 1991–2017.”[8] D’Anieri’s first book, Economic Interdependence in Ukrainian-Russian Relations, (SUNY, 1999) examined the dilemmas Ukraine faced in trying to be politically independent from Russia while remaining highly interdependent economically.
A reviewer said the collected essays “make a profound contribution to the study of Ukrainian civil society and its evolving relationship to the state.” [14] Dilemmas of State-Led Nation Building in Ukraine, (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), which D’Anieri co-edited with Taras Kuzio was named a Choice “Outstanding Academic Book” of 2003.
He also addresses common student deficiencies in history, policy, culture, and geography through case studies of real-world events, and emphasizes that a better understanding of international relations can often be gained by examining problems from multiple approaches.”[17] In 1997, D’Anieri received a prestigious Kemper Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching.
At the time, he was the only assistant professor ever to have received the award, which singled out his “teaching and advising at the Freshman-Sophomore level.”[18] D’Anieri also earned praise from the graduate students he worked with.
From 2003 to 2004, D’Anieri was director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Kansas, where he “continued the tradition of excellence in CREES leadership”.
[26] D’Anieri was principal investigator on the center's $786,000 Title VI National Resource Center grant from the US Department of Education, as well as a grant through the Freedom Support Act to develop “Critical New and Expanded Capabilities in the Social Sciences in Ukraine.” From 2004 to 2008, D’Anieri was associate dean for humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas.
[28] D’Anieri was instrumental in forging a partnership between KU and the US Army's nearby base at Ft. Leavenworth, a major component of which was a program to educate officers about cultural aptitude.
[36] In a subsequent budget cut, D’Anieri managed to avoid elimination of faculty positions via creation of a shared services center that dramatically reduced administrative costs.
[37] In 2009, Psychology Department Chair Neil Rowland wrote “We are very pleased that Dr Paul D’Anieri came from the University of Kansas to be the new Dean of CLAS as of July, and I know these are not the kind of challenges that he had envisioned in his first year!”[38] He was deeply involved in UFs adoption of Responsibility Center Management, making numerous suggestions on how the model could serve rather than undermine the academic mission.
“Paul Ortiz, director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, said Wednesday that D’Anieri was a respected intellectual and academic scholar who continued to teach in the classroom even as an administrator.
‘A lot of academics give up teaching when they become deans, that is bad for college or university.’ ‘He stepped in really at the beginning of the budget crisis,’ said Ortiz, who came to UF around the same time as D’Anieri.
Chancellor Kim Wilcox said at the time: “He is a seasoned academic administrator, an authoritative scholar, and an inspiring leader who deeply understands the University of California’s mission of providing excellence in research, teaching, and public service.” His charge was “implementation of the campus strategic plan, UCR 2020: The Path to Preeminence.”[1] The strategic plan,[40] which aspired to give UCR the profile of members of the Association of American Universities, (the top 62 research universities in the country, such as Harvard, Stanford and Berkeley), focused on goals including improving student graduation rates, increasing external research funding, and diversifying the faculty.
At UC Riverside, D’Anieri and vice chancellor for planning and budget Maria Anguiano led a highly innovative pilot project intended to better understand how the costs of different teaching approaches relate to their outcomes.
It involved the must sustained effort to apply ABC in a university to date, and produced a white paper evaluating the strengths and limitations of the approach.
“In the two-plus years I have been at UCR, every major indicator of our success is up dramatically: applications, graduation rates, research funding, and the diversity of our senior administration and our newly hired faculty.”[52] By the time of D’Anieri's resignation: After stepping down as provost at UC Riverside in February 2017, D’Anieri returned to his research on Ukraine and Russia, and continued assisting other universities interested in improving their financial and budgeting practices.
In the 1990s, people in the West generally assumed that the spread of democracy would be a source of peace in the region, but by 2013, Russia saw democratization as a threat worth fighting over.
I want to delve into how and why that happened.”[56] He also continued his work on University finance and budgeting, designing a curriculum on the topic for the American Council on Education, working in particular with the ACE Fellows Program, “The nation’s premier higher education leadership development program preparing senior leaders to serve American colleges and universities.”[57] In the 2018–19 academic year, D’Anieri will teach a course on the topic in the School of Public Policy at UC Riverside.
On December 16, 2016, D'Anieri tendered his resignation as Executive Vice Chancellor & Provost of UC Riverside rather than face a vote of no confidence by the Faculty Senate, whose members strongly objected to his "top-down" leadership style, his contempt for shared governance, and the "climate of fear and mistrust" he and UC Riverside Chancellor Kim A. Wilcox had generated on campus.
"[59] Despite claiming that "D’Anieri should not be blamed for decisions ... that were made collectively by senior administrators," including a "cluster hiring" initiative that had drawn criticism from the Faculty Senate for its extremely poor planning,[61] Wilcox accepted his resignation.