Professional Biography
Matthew Hartley is Professor of Education and Board of Advisors Chair of Education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. He specializes in higher education leadership, reform, and governance, and the roles of colleges and universities in democratic societies. From 2015 to 2022 he served as associate dean for academic affairs of Penn GSE, and from 2022 to 2024 he served as deputy dean of the school. In that capacity he oversaw academic and student affairs, admissions, career services, and the registrar. With Dean Pam Grossman he led a collaborative strategic visioning process to establish key priorities of the school.
Dr. Hartley is founding executive director of Penn GSE's Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy (Penn AHEAD). He has served on the editorial boards of the Review of Higher Education and the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement. He serves as a trustee at Widener University in Chester, PA, and at Abai Kazakh National University in Almaty, Kazakhstan. He earned his master’s and doctorate from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.
Research Interests and Current Projects
With his colleague Professor Alan Ruby, Dr. Hartley is completing a book for Cambridge University Press that profiles institutions in eight national settings — Bangladesh, Chile, India, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Qatar, Russia, and the United States — that are engaged in deeply impactful work but will never be in the top of any international rankings scheme. These institutions offer competing conceptions of excellence that counter the “world-class university” model, the pursuit of which requires the allocation of enormous resources. The study shows how these institutions have defined excellence on their own terms and engaged in remarkable work that is leading to student success in underserved populations and supporting their wider communities. The project is supported by a grant from the Qatar Foundation.
For more than a decade Dr. Hartley has partnered with colleagues at Nazarbayev University’s Graduate School of Education in Astana, Kazakhstan. Their research examines how universities in that country are responding to reforms granting them unprecedented academic and fiscal autonomy. The research has informed national policies and served as the basis for capacity-building work throughout the country. In 2019 Dr. Hartley received a national research award from the Ministry of Education and Science for contributions to the development of research for the Republic of Kazakhstan.
From 2010 to 2012, Dr. Hartley served as an expert for the World Bank on a project examining the governance of universities in the Middle East and North Africa. He has also worked with the Council of Europe in Strasburg, France, on a major project examining links between the concept of Education for Democratic Citizenship and university–community partnerships. In 2011, he completed a Fulbright in Bratislava, Slovakia, in partnership with the Slovak Governance Institute examining the launch of community-based learning efforts at several universities.
Journal Editorial Boards
Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement
Editorial Board