By Mazdak Razi | 2023-09-13

Over the past several weeks, ahead of the start of the new academic year in Iran on September 23, a large group of university lecturers have been dismissed from multiple universities across the country.

Meanwhile, a number of unqualified pro-regime individuals have quietly been hired to teach in multiple public universities in Tehran and a few other major cities.

Dismissed university lecturers were given obscure reasons for their firing, some of which is academic-related. But observers say the real reason for their dismissal is that they were either anti-regime or nonreligious, albeit covertly.

The decisions to fire the new group of lecturers have been made, at least in part, because of the looming first anniversary of the anti-establishment movement and the regime's concern about protests in universities, which happened last year.

The domestic moderate Etemad daily has published a list containing the names of 157 university lecturers -- many of them tenured or full professors -- who have been fired from various Iranian universities in the past 17 years, under three different administrations.

Etemad emphasized that the list is by no means exhaustive, adding that it contains only the names of individuals who have come forward and spoken publicly about their dismissal, and whose firing the newspaper can confirm.

The daily listed the names of 58 lecturers who have been let go in the past few weeks (under Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi's administration), 14 others who lost their jobs under former president Hassan Rouhani and 85 who were fired under former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The latest wave of dismissals comes on the heels of widespread months-long protests over women's rights and freedoms and the dire state of the economy.

Ultra hardliners' reign

The death of 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian Mahsa Amini on September 16, 2022, in custody of the regime's "morality police" sparked the protests, the largest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The protests morphed into a movement under the slogan "Women, Life, Freedom", which was supported by people and governments across the globe.

In the past three decades, a number of Iranian presidents have been moderate or reformist, creating a wedge between their administration and the other two branches of the government -- the Majles (Iran's parliament) and the judiciary --both of which have always been controlled by ultra hardline Iranian leader Ali Khamenei and sources close to him.

The state-owned radio and television stations (IRIB) have also traditionally been controlled by hardline powers who are closely affiliated with Khamenei.

With Raisi's presidency, ultra-hardliners have gained control over the executive branch, too, while they already ruled over the Majles and IRIB.

Now, these conservative groups have been targeting universities, attempting to mold them into the shape they like and to prevent further protests, observers say.

A newly retired university professor who did not want to be named told Pishtaz his main motivation for retiring early was to escape the university environment as the pressure and restrictions on him and his colleagues had become hard to bear.

In mid-August, Iranian media outlets quoted Ali Sharifi-Zarchi, a prominent assistant professor of bioinformatics at the reputable Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, as saying that some 15,000 regime-affiliated individuals have been secretly hired as faculty members.

The hiring process for these individuals was abrupt and obscure and did not follow the norms of academic hiring in Iran's public universities, he said.

He described the dismissal of university lecturers as a "disaster" and the academic community's silence at this time as "betraying Iran."

Sharifi-Zarchi was fired from Sharif University shortly after making these statements. He was also summoned by the Ministry of Intelligence and ultimately became the most high-profile, and certainly most vocal, newly fired lecturer.

On August 26, after news of his dismissal was widely reported, he was appointed as chair of the Scientific Committee of the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI).

On August 31, conservative dailies described the dismissal of dozens of university lecturers as the implementation of the government's policy of "unifying the body of higher education."

Historically anti-academia

In late August, in a report referring to what it cited as "bitter days" for Iranian universities, the daily Etemad wrote: "Homogenization of the higher education body is a project that is being seriously pursued by the [Raisi] administration," adding that the administration "has no intention to compromise."

Ahmad Bokharai, chairman of the Department of Political Sociology at the Iranian Sociological Association, said, "The misconception within Iran's political system is that that the situation can be controlled by suppression and removing the issue."

"However, this manner of dealing with university professors in fact inflames it and has irreversible consequences," he told the website Iran Watch.

The Islamic Republic has historically been against science, academia and the academic community.

In 1961, 18 years prior to founding the Islamic regime in Iran, Islamic Republic founder Rouhollah Khomeini described universities as dangerous, adding that they endanger society more than cluster bombs would.

The regime has constantly followed this ideology over the years and has steadily maintained an anti-academia stance.

Over a year after the Islamic Revolution, the regime targeted universities that had become the focal point of opposition activities.

A large number of professors were fired, and many students were expelled. Universities were then closed per Khomeini's order for a three-year period which the regime named "Cultural Revolution," during which the syllabi and textbooks were entirely rewritten or heavily modified.

The government's new wave of aggression and its attempt to stifle the academic community is doomed to fail, said Pirouz Farmand, an Iranian expert on higher education.

"This policy of the Islamic Republic is doomed to fail. Its fight against universities is like Don Quixote's confrontation with the windmills, or the medieval Catholic Church's opposition to modern science and astronomy," he added.

"The regime's efforts are similar to trying to prevent water from boiling at 100 degrees celsius or freezing at 0 degrees celsius by threats and suppression. In the long run, this policy will never succeed," he told Pishtaz.