At 6:12 AM last Wednesday morning at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport, Ukrainian International Airways Flight 752 (PS752) trundled down the runway for take-off on its scheduled flight to Kyiv.  The flight, with 176 souls aboard, carried roughly 60 Canadian citizens (source counts vary), as well as another 82 Iranians and 24 others, including the plane’s crew who were all Ukrainian.  At least 130 of the passengers were connecting in Kyiv to another flight destined for Toronto and from there many were travelling throughout Canada.

A high proportion of the Toronto-destined passengers on board – both those who were Canadian citizens and those who were not – were associated with Canadian universities.  From what we know, the plane carried 51 people employed at or studying in 23 Canadian post-secondary institutions.  This included eight professors/instructors: two professors from the University of Alberta (one of whom held a Canada Research Chair), two doctoral students/instructors at École de technologie supérieure, a couple who taught at Cestar College in Toronto, one instructor with appointments at both Ontario Tech and Centennial College, and a dentist in Halifax who seems to have had a connection with Dalhousie’s dental school (this has not been confirmed by the school).  The flight was also carrying at least twenty PhD students, mostly at the Universities of Alberta, Toronto, Western, and Windsor.  Most of the remainder were listed either as master’s or undifferentiated “graduate” students.  An employee of MITACS, based at the University of Manitoba, was also on the flight.

(We do not know about other students who may have been on the flight.  One person on the manifest was a recent U of A grad who had just enrolled at San Diego State.  Another was a recent graduate of Sharif University looking to study in Canada; some reports from protests in Tehran, which erupted outside Amir Kabir University on Friday, spoke of students protesting “the deaths of their friends and colleagues”.)

Three minutes later, with the plane at an altitude just short of 8,000 feet, there was a sudden catastrophe.  Seconds later, the debris of the aircraft spread across the ground about fifteen miles north of the airport.  There were no survivors.

Outside of war conditions, it is difficult to think of any event in the world which has struck so many campuses simultaneously.  Our little world of around 2.5 million students, faculty and staff lost over 50 of our best last week. 

All day Wednesday and Thursday, stories poured in from across Canada.  Thousands of hearts breaking in a dozen cities across six provinces.  So many good people, so many dear friends….and just so, so much talent.  Gone, in an instant.

The revelation that the deaths were caused by the Iranian military was cause for protests in Tehran.  Elsewhere, no doubt people want to point fingers at Donald Trump for having needlessly ordered the assassination of an Iranian military officer the previous week.   If you want to point to root causes, you could probably go back to the CIA overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953.   But in the end, our friends and colleagues were innocent bystanders caught in a horrific, preventable accident.   It is a tragedy, a loss, a void.   Justice must be done, of course, but for now it seems secondary.

There was, perhaps, a moment of fleeting wonder that so many talented people connected to our schools could come from one faraway country.  But they do.  Iranians in Canada are among the country’s most educated ethnic groups, and the number of student visas issued to Iranians has increased fourfold in the last four years.  And though they are especially numerous in the GTA’s northern suburbs and parts of BC’s Lower Mainland, they are, like many ethnic groups in Canada, spread widely across this huge country of ours.

(Canadians think that what distinguishes us from Europeans is the number of immigrants we take in.  This is not true – many European countries accept just as many immigrants as we do.  The difference is, over there they end up geographically clustered.  A Dutch academic friend of mine had his mind blown wandering along Bloor Street when he came to visit a few years ago.  It wasn’t the number of ethnic restaurants that he saw; it was the fact that you had the Turkish one next to the Korean one, next to the Ethiopian, next to the Mexican one, which to him was totally inconceivable.  Canada’s secret sauce, as Doug Saunders astutely pointed out in his excellent book Arrival City,is the way they get stirred around and don’t just cluster in one place.  The result is that when a tragedy like this happens, it’s a genuinely pan-Canadian one)

It says something quite profound both about Canada and Iran that so many people from so far away could contribute so much to life in a new country.  And it is why I think we need to think very seriously, very soon, about the ways to commemorate the dead.  Because it is a complicated story.  It was an Iranian tragedy, involving mostly ethnic Persians, over Iranian airspace.  And yet it involved so many Canadians, and Canadians-to-be, people who contributed so much to country.  It is about mobility – most, in fact, travelled back and forth relatively frequently – but also about identity (and how Canada does not really require immigrants to abandon their cultures).  It is a story of deeply entwined fates, shared across two continents and thousands of kilometres.

Syracuse University lost three dozen of its students when Pan Am 103 was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, in a 1988 terror attack which claimed 270 lives.  Its commemoration of that event  involved both a physical memorial and a set of scholarships, and I think our commemoration should follow Syracuse’s example.  Perhaps two memorials – one in Canada and one near Tehran – linked permanently, just as the dead kept a foot in both worlds.  And, scholarships for Iranian students to come here.  As many as possible, as quickly as possible.  All those unwritten theses and course outlines can now never be finished, but new chapters and new frontiers in academia can still be written by a new generation of Iranians studying in Canadian universities.

Gone but not forgotten.  Rest in Peace.