PHOTO: Iran’s President Rouhani and the Supreme Leader, July 2015
President Rouhani has implicitly challenged the Supreme Leader over Iran’s universities, resisting attempts to constrain academic freedom in the name of “security”.
At a breaking of the Ramadan fast with university professors on Wednesday, the President urged officials to avoid “looking at universities and students through a security lens”. He asked, “How do we not trust universities and then want them to trust us afterwards?”
On Saturday, the Supreme Leader told academics that universities must remain “revolutionary”. Invoking the threat of a “soft war” by Western countries against the Islamic Republic, he instructed:
Do not allow universities to foment opposition to the Revolution… Anyone who challenges the system at every opportunity, like the elections, is unreliable and does not have the qualifications to be in a university.
Since he took office in August 2013, Rouhani has repeatedly called for an opening of Iran’s political and social space. He has criticized punishment of Iranians over public behavior and fashion, and he has resisted calls for the “Islamicization” of higher education.
Last month, the Supreme Leader and the President had an indirect public exchange over education in English. Hostile to the US, Ayatollah Khamenei chided those who sought to read and write English. Rouhani responded, “However much we can familiarize our youth with other languages of the world, we have opened a new window of science, knowledge and understanding of the world to them.”
After the mass protests in 2009 over the disputed Presidential election, Iranian authorities cracked down on university campuses, dismissing professors and expelling students. Some student activists such as Bahareh Hedayat, detained in December 2009, remain in prison.
