This is from the Chronicle of Higher Education's 3 part series on education in Iran. I wanted to blog it because I (Professor O'Neil) met the author, Ms. Labi during my stay in Iran this summer. Part way down the article you'll see a quote from Nasser Hadian, a political science professor at Tehran University. Professor Hadian and I were actually meeting beforehand, and Ms. Labi joined us. Professor Hadian grew up with President Ahmadinejad, so we had a long-ranging conversation about politics and education, which you can get a sense of here.
Among Scholars, Resistance and Resilience in Iran
Tradition of dissent survives despite government pressure
By AISHA LABI
Tehran
Reza Negahdary cuts a surprisingly visible figure at the University of Tehran for someone who has been suspended. Clad in tight jeans and a maroon T-shirt emblazoned with a glittering double-headed eagle, he has stationed himself in the central hallway of the faculty of law and political science. Thrusting a pen at fellow students, he exhorts them to demand that the administration allow for "a free, open, and absolutely democratic election" to the Islamic Association of Students, the reformist group to which he belongs.
Mr. Negahdary, an intense young man who usually has a cigarette in his hand, is barred from classes for three terms and was kicked out of the dorms but has had little problem coming and going on the campus.
In fact, he says he feels safer here than anywhere else. "Outside the university is dangerous," he says. "There are executions if people get politically active. Here, there is suppression, but you don't get executed."
Iran's image in the West has been largely shaped by its defiant, blustering president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his government's heavy-handed treatment of its citizens. Students have been arrested for their opposition politics, and scores more have been suspended. Internationally renowned scholars, like the Iranian-American Haleh Esfandiari, have been jailed. Provocative publications have been forced to close. And the morality police have upped their harassment of pedestrians on the streets of Tehran for clothing and hairstyles that do not meet the regime's definition of Islamic standards.
But as Mr. Negahdary's very visible presence illustrates, the sometimes cartoonish image of a nation oppressed, isolated, and angry fails to capture the complicated nature of Iranian society and, especially, academe.
Much of the rest of the world is trying to decipher Iran's intentions. Its political and military influence in Lebanon and Iraq, where it has backed Shiite militias, suggests that it wants to become a dominant political force in the region. Its determination to develop its nuclear program, despite international condemnation, has cemented its image in the minds of many as a rogue nation.
Iran's universities provide some insights for those who want to understand its politics. Iranians have an acute sense of national pride and see their higher-education system as the repository of a robust intellectual tradition that predates the arrival of Islam in Persia. Professors are held in high esteem, and many high-ranking government officials, including Mr. Ahmadinejad, are academics by training.
While far from unfettered, many students and professors here remain unyielding and outspoken in their criticism of the regime. And academics continue to maintain ties to the outside world, playing host to a steady stream of international visitors and traveling abroad for conferences and study.
Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, a professor of economics at Virginia Tech, left Iran in 1971 but still visits there regularly. "I am old enough to remember academic life under the Shah, and that was much, much worse," he says. "Professors were so afraid of even talking in front of students. Now is a fairly open atmosphere. The boundary has been pushed, but it is not America yet." Indeed, at times the government seems bent on making high-profile examples of some of the most outspoken activists who push too far.
Deceptive Appearances
At first glance, the tranquil campuses of Iran's universities can seem more conservative than Tehran itself. While many cosmopolitan Iranian women cover their heads with a loosely tied scarf, the black wimple-like head covering called a maghnae is usually required on college campuses and at other public institutions. And at the women's entrance to the Ministry of Science, Research & Technology, several young women are sternly pointed toward a box of tissues and a jar of cold cream to remove excess lipstick and eye shadow.
But, like the sober-hued roopoosh — the required, coatlike garment under which women wear trendy designer jeans, appearances can be deceiving: Campus activism has a long and proud tradition in Iran.
Students have played a pivotal role in social and political upheavals in Iran over the past three decades, from the demonstrations that presaged the Islamic revolution in 1979 to a wave of pro-democracy actions in 1999, sparked by the closure of a leading reformist newspaper, in which at least three students were killed and scores were arrested.
Sporadic demonstrations have roiled campuses in the past year and a half, with students protesting rising food costs and the inflexibility of Mr. Ahmadinejad's hard-line conservative government.
The government clearly views the country's 3.3 million college students as a powerful and potentially problematic political voice. Last year three students from Amirkabir University of Technology, where President Ahmadinejad had been greeted by demonstrators during a visit, were arrested for publishing statements deemed offensive to Islam in a campus newspaper. Their continued detention has sparked demonstrations that have drawn hundreds of supporters.
Mr. Negahdary, the student activist at the University of Tehran, was suspended this year for his leading role in a protest against Mr. Ahmadinejad during a campus visit last October. Students chanted "Death to the dictator" and accused Mr. Ahmadinejad's regime of corruption.
"We protested because at Columbia, Mr. Ahmadinejad said that we are the most free country in the world," says Mr. Negahdary, referring to the president's controversial New York visit last year.
Professors, too, are seen as a threat. Although the president was once a professor of traffic and transport at Tehran's Iran University of Science and Technology, he is viewed with suspicion and thinly veiled disdain by much of the cosmopolitan intellectual establishment.
The hostility is reciprocated. Soon after Mr. Ahmadinejad's surprise election victory in 2005, which he owed to the rural working class, he began speaking of the need to remove secular and liberal influences from universities. Government officials in charge of education policy echo the theme, speaking of shaping the future of Iranian higher education on Islamic precepts.
One of Mr. Ahmadinejad's first actions was to replace the president of the University of Tehran. The new leader, a senior cleric, presided over the forced retirement of some 40 professors, prompting fears of religious and intellectual repression.
Those fears were exacerbated by several high-profile firings. A professor who taught at Shiraz University was forced out after saying at a conference on the Holocaust that it could not be denied as a historical fact.
Yet while a crackdown is under way, it is not a straightforward matter of a conservative government flexing its political muscle over a liberal academic establishment powerless to resist.
The cleric who was appointed to head the University of Tehran was himself removed from office this year after weeks of student demonstrations accusing him of mismanagement.
Much like the partisan bickering between Democrats and Republicans in the United States, Iranian academics say, Iran's government is devolving into a two-wing system of conservatives and reformists. Universities, which are state institutions, reflect that division.
Conservatives are ascendant, as evidenced by some of the recent forced retirements and other personnel appointments.
"They are trying to appoint people at the departmental level to reinforce the type of environment they want and who will reorient the universities in the way they want," says Nasser Hadian, an outspoken reformist and political-science professor who has taught at Tehran for decades.
But the reformists are too numerous — and their legal protections as tenured professors too powerful — to be eliminated.
Mr. Hadian notes that three former departmental colleagues forced to retire, who he says were more the victims of longstanding interdepartmental personality conflicts than political vendettas, stand a good chance of being reinstated.
Other Pressures
The government's pressure on academics and students, although inconsistent, is having an effect.
At the University of Tehran, officials have tried, for example, to quell opposition voices indirectly by hand-selecting representatives for the Islamic Association of Students, the more reform-minded of the two main student organizations with branches on most campuses.
At Sharif University of Technology, an elite Tehran institution renowned for its science programs, members of the association gathered signatures in May for a petition denouncing a conservative group calling itself the Islamic Association of Independent Students.
The name is deceptively close to their own, says Arman Mirhashemi, a fourth-year engineering student who sat at the petition table outside a cafeteria. A purple foam Statue of Liberty-inspired head ornament barely shaded his genial, chubby face from the blazing sun.
At Sharif, he says, more students belong to the Basij Students' Organization, the campus arm of a volunteer paramilitary organization founded in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini.
But political activity of any kind is a low priority for most of his peers.
"In this university, students just study," he says.
Mr. Mirhashemi can afford to be more active because he almost has his degree and is now focused on applying to graduate programs overseas.
The day of Mr. Negahdary's appearance at the University of Tehran, he is joined by Roya, a first-year law student who took part in the October protests. Like many of the women on the campus she is heavily made up, ignoring the threat of the fashion police.
Roya, who asks that her last name not be printed, says her hero is Benazir Bhutto, whom she admired for her courage. But she and other female students have also had their courage tested by lurid tales of what happens to women who are arrested.
Roya's eyes, dramatically lined and highlighted by glittery blue shadow, widen as she talks about a female medical student who was reportedly raped in jail.
"Most of the girls arrested are raped in jail," she says. "Families can't cope with that."
Because of such reports, she says, she and other female students have become less outspoken and less likely to take part in future demonstrations.
Sometimes the government's attempts to control student activities can take odd forms. Mahmoud Alaci, a law student, is a member of a campus classical-music ensemble that was scheduled to perform a concert in May featuring works by Mozart, Beethoven, and other Western composers.
Mr. Alaci says the group was given permission weeks earlier and had never guessed the performance was going to be controversial. Western classical music is much loved in Iran. As anyone who has ventured into Tehran's crowded streets can attest, Beethoven's "Für Elise" is an irritatingly ubiquitous cellphone ring tone.
But the conservative regime has deemed such music to be un-Islamic, so university officials began pressing the students to change the program. The officials asked that the event include an anniversary memorial to the emancipation of Khorramshahr, a strategically important port city that was occupied by Saddam Hussein's forces during the Iran-Iraq war.
The students held the concert but ignored the request.
"We didn't mention at all what the officials asked us to say," Mr. Alaci says, noting that the event drew an audience of about 200.
It was a minor triumph, a skirmish in the continuing struggle by students to pursue their own cultural agenda, but one that Mr. Alaci is not inclined to repeat anytime soon. "It's too difficult to get all the permissions," he says wearily.
Conservatives on the Rise
The ascendance of Mr. Ahmadinejad's conservative government has also heightened tensions among students.
Conflict between reformist and conservative student groups has at times escalated into outright violence. Some students who took part in the October protest say that students affiliated with Basij, the volunteer paramilitary group with roots that go back to Ayatollah Khomeini, helped the authorities beat them back.
"They took part in the crackdown," Mr. Negahdary complains. "I was sentenced because of a violation of law and order, but when the Basiji do the same thing in support of the government, they never get this kind of sentence."
Mohammad Jafari, a slight, bearded young law student affiliated with Basij, says the group represents an effort to develop moral values and solidarity independent of Western influences.
"We believe Iranian society has to get ideas and policies from Islamic society," he says. Portraits of the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are ubiquitous in public buildings and loom over even the most unprepossessing offices, but the relatively small one that hangs on the wall of the otherwise sparely adorned student Basij office has special significance. The group defines itself by its special commitment to the supreme leadership, Mr. Jafari says.
The group's more radical tendencies are just one part of its identity, though. One May afternoon, on an outlying campus at the University of Tehran, female members of Basij gathered to meet a special visitor.
It was the anniversary of the liberation of Khorramshahr. The widow of a soldier killed during the siege — considered a martyr in Iran — had come.
Sara Muhamad Kamal, an elementary-school teacher and graduate of the university, organized the session. The group's activities, she says, include arranging conferences and panel discussions related to martyrdom and social outreach to help the poor. She cuts short a conversation as the widow enters the room, her chador and the others swirling in unison as the women rise excitedly to greet their guest.
Attention to Academics
Their political passions notwithstanding, Iranian students, like students anywhere, remain largely consumed with their courses.
That's not surprising, perhaps, given that securing a spot at one of the country's leading universities is the goal of every ambitious young Iranian.
Families that can afford to do so enroll their children in prep courses to boost their chances of landing a berth at an elite institution, and posters for those classes are ubiquitous along the traffic-choked streets of Tehran.
In a classroom a few doors down from the Basiji women's office, the lectern behind which Pooya Alaedini, a professor of social planning, is standing bears a boldly lettered graffiti slogan in English: "The more I make love, the more I want to make REVOLUTION."
The students are oblivious to the incendiary statement, which looks as if it has been there for quite a while. All instead focus intently on the equations Mr. Alaedini is scribbling on the whiteboard.
Mr. Negahdary, the suspended activist, believes that despite the apparent apathy of many Iranian university students, revolutionary fervor lurks just below the surface on most campuses. The conservative regime thinks so too, he says. "The government is afraid of the students, that if they come out of the dorms, it will provoke wider protests in the streets," he says. With students like Mr. Negahdary and academics determined to express their views, Iran's universities will remain the centers of activism and opposition politics they have always been, despite the regime's efforts to silence the most troublesome voices.
http://chronicle.com
Section: International
Volume 54, Issue 47, Page A1
