After almost a decade of harsh limits on higher education and international exchanges, Iran is undergoing something of an academic spring.
Hassan Rouhani, a moderate cleric who was elected president last year, has lifted some restrictions on the country’s universities and encouraged greater collaboration with foreign professors. At the same time, as a sign of somewhat improving relations between Iran and the United States, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has eased economic sanctions to allow American colleges to establish partnerships with their Iranian counterparts.
American scholars have been able to visit Iran over the years for limited academic purposes, but the recent changes have led to hope for more robust international exchanges and greater academic freedom in Iran.
“I’m part of this opening,” said Kevan Harris, associate director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University. Mr. Harris helped coordinate a high-profile visit to Iran in March by Immanuel Wallerstein, an American sociologist.
Mr. Wallerstein lectured to a packed audience at the University of Tehran and also spoke at Iran’s Center for Strategic Research, a think tank Mr. Rouhani helped to found. Mr. Wallerstein, a senior research scientist at Yale University who has written about global economic inequality, touched on topics rarely discussed on Iranian campuses, like women’s rights.
“I’m not going to change the internal politics of Iran just by coming there, I can assure you,” Mr. Wallerstein told The Chronicle, but he sees cause for optimism, he said. “The intellectuals I met are very anxious to have normal collegial contact outside of Iran, and feel very frustrated for being so cut off.”
Despite such signs of renewed academic relations, many observers of Iran are wary of declaring a new era of openness, with some saying Mr. Rouhani has a lot of work to do to reverse the limits placed on higher education by his conservative predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
A new report from Amnesty International emphasizes just how much needs to be done to undo the most restrictive provisions. “Some improvements have definitely been made, but the issue is that they have not been enough and have not addressed the root causes of the violations,” said Bahareh Davis, an Iran researcher at Amnesty and an author of “Silenced, Expelled, Imprisoned: Repression of Students and Academics in Iran.”
Positive Signs
Iran’s universities have been a point of tension between conservative and reformist factions since the early years of the Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The religious leader saw universities as a stronghold of Western ideas, and at pivotal moments, most recently during the disputed presidential election of 2009, campuses have been a battleground for conflicts in the broader society.
During Mr. Ahmadinejad’s eight years as president, starting in 2005, students who actively supported the political opposition were expelled and religious minorities such as Bahai students remained largely excluded from higher education. Some courses and programs seen as incompatible with Islam, such as women’s studies, were eliminated, and other humanities and social-science programs had their content altered to reflect Islamic principles.
What’s more, the practice of allowing universities autonomy over selecting leaders was ended, the government took a more direct role in faculty hiring, and many professors deemed too secular or Western were fired or forced to retire early.
Ali Kadivar, a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Tehran, said higher education became a target of what he calls “political and intellectual purges.”
Today the pendulum has swung in favor of the reformists, and many Iranians want to see Mr. Rouhani deliver on the promises of openness he made during the election campaign, said Mr. Harris of Princeton. “Most of the credit goes to students and faculty in Iran themselves, who have been making their problems well known,” he said.
In one sign of concrete changes, the newly elected government established a committee within the ministry of science, which oversees universities, to review complaints from the more than 500 students and faculty members who had been banned from campuses or fired during the Ahmadinejad era.
Last August the ministry said that 126 banned students had been allowed to return to university campuses. Some programs that had been eliminated under Mr. Ahmadinejad are once again enrolling students.
Mehdi Noorbaksh, an associate professor of international affairs at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, in Pennsylvania, cited as positive signs the removal soon after Mr. Rouhani took office of two Ahmadinejad-era university presidents and the rehiring of faculty members who had been forced to retire.
“He is pushing, even if he has a long way to go,” Mr. Noorbaksh said.
He sees Mr. Rouhani’s own academic credentials and the doctorate he earned from Glasgow Caledonian University, in Scotland, as evidence that the new president understands how universities should function in a democratic society.
“Everything is changing,” Mr. Noorbaksh said. “The environment is changing drastically, and it now feels like the universities are really liberated. Debates are very much alive, and university students are becoming much more active.”
‘All Sorts of Tensions’
Mr. Rouhani has also called for stronger academic links with the West. In October, during a visit to the University of Tehran, he urged “security apparatuses” not to block professors from taking part in international academic conferences, calling it “scientific diplomacy.”
On the American side, the Institute of International Education “is reviewing opportunities to restart academic collaboration between the United States and Iran,” Allan E. Goodman, the group’s president, said in a written statement.
Ali Ansari, director of the Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, said that he was “cautiously optimistic” about the possibility of stronger academic ties between the two countries. But, he said, such efforts could be derailed quickly: “There are all sorts of tensions, all sorts of pushes and pulls, that we need to be sensitive about.”
He cited the Obama administration’s decision in April to not grant a visa to Iran’s proposed ambassador to the United Nations because of suspected ties to the 1979-81 hostage crisis as an example. “We probably owe it to them,” he said, “not to push too quickly.”
