UPDATE, JULY 12:

Seven professors at the Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences (pictured) in western Iran have been fired after a Kurdish folk dance with both men and women at a graduation ceremony.

Video from the June 1 ceremony, of students and professors of both sexes dancing freely on the stage, went viral recently. The University’s public relations department said the dance was conducted without official permission and crossed “red lines”.

The offending video:

The dismissals come amid a wave of arrests by Iranian authorities of reformists, activists, and film directors, as the country faces ongoing economic problems.

See also Iran Arrests Leading Reformist Tajzadeh, Top Film Directors


ORIGINAL ENTRY: More than 100 international scholars and academics have written an open letter protesting the firing of university professors “for political reasons” by Iran’s authorities.

The 105 signatories noted, “It is the politics of intolerance and a lack of respect for academic freedom that have prompted their unjustified terminations.” They cited the restrictions on freedom of expression in “a country that has suffered so much from brain drain and ever shrinking body of experienced scholarly personnel”.

The scholars are from universities in the US, UK, France, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Ireland, Canada, India, Turkey, and Qatar.

The letter did not name specific professors who have been removed from Iranian universities, because the signatories “did not want to jeopardize [their] situation”.

However, in recent weeks, dismissals have included Arash Abazari from the Department of Philosophy at the Sharif University of Technology; Bijan Abdolkarimi, a philosophy professor at Azad University; Reza Omidi, a social policy expert at Tehran University; and Mohammad Fazeli, professor of sociology at Tehran’s Shahid Beheshti University.

Fazeli worked at the Center for Strategic Studies, the research arm of the President’s office, under the centrist Hassan Rouhani administration. Rouhani was replaced by the hardliner Ebrahim Raisi in August.

He responded on Twitter last month: “One of the worst moments in the history of a nation is a moment or period in which nothing is surprising. In the face of surprise or wrongdoing, people ask: ‘Did you expect anything else?’”

Ebrahim Azadegan, the head of Sharif University’s Philosophy Department, said Iranian authorities wrongly accused Professor Abazari of signing an open letter in 2010, soon after the mass protests against the disputed 2009 Presidential election.

Professor Abdolkarimi said he was removed from his position over a 2019 speech which was interpreted as support of the 2009 protests.

The international scholars concluded their open letter, “We demand that all dismissed professors be unconditionally reinstated immediately so that they continue their productive services to their students, institutions, and broader community.”