Iran is a country with a lot of higher education stories. Take stories about students: they were a key part of the coalition that overthrew the Shah in 1979, and they were the ones who spearheaded the capture of the US embassy later that year. But since 1999, students have also been consistently and reliably at the head of anti-government protests. Iranian universities are as a result the centre of a great deal of physical confrontation at moments of national rebellion, such as the one that occurred in late December and early January.
Or take stories about institutions and science. One of the least-heralded developments in global higher education in the 2010s was the emergence of Iran as a major source of scientific advance, particularly in medical science. Despite never having had one of those fancy “excellence initiatives”, scholarly output rose nearly twenty-fold in the first two decades of the century. Equally unheralded though was the rapid decline in enrolments the country has seen in the 2020s due mainly (but not solely) to demographic change.
With me today is Saeid Golkar. He’s a professor of political science at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga and a scholar of the tactics of Iran’s Basij – part of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard – and of social control under the Iran’s Islamic Government. Today we talk about all aspects of Iranian higher education – it’s development, it’s rise and fall, the degree of political control that the regime exerts over universities, and the role that students have played over time in Iran’s political system. Note that this interview was conducted on February 20th, eight days before the joint Israeli/American air strikes on Tehran and other Iranian sites and thus will no longer quite reflect the current situation in the country.
And without further ado — over to Saeid.
The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 4.23 | Why Iranian Students Keep Protesting
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): What does the higher education system look like in Iran today? Does it have lots of big multidisciplinary institutions, you know, like American flagship institutions, or is it one of those countries that has lots of small, specialized institutions?
Saeid Golkar (SG): Very good question, actually. Iran’s higher education system is large, but uneven and, more importantly, politically shaped. At the top, we have a small group of flagship public universities, mostly in the major cities. They are very selective and very prestigious, like Tehran University, for example.
Alongside them, we have specialized institutions in engineering and sometimes in medicine, often with links to the state and the job market. But at the core of the system, Iran’s higher education is divided into two main groups. Medical education is run through the Ministry of Health and Medical Education, so all medical education is under the control of that ministry. Every other university is under the control of the Ministry of Science and Technology.
Besides these state flagship universities, we have other institutions—semi-private universities spread throughout Iran that try to recruit people who are not able to go to the state universities. So it’s a tuition-based system. All of these universities are under the control of either the Ministry of Health and Medical Education or the Ministry of Science.
And then there is an unelected body at the top of the whole system: the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, which sets the cultural and ideological planning and programming for the universities. This institution is unelected and controlled by the Supreme Leader. So everything in Iran is hierarchical, with control flowing from the Supreme Leader down to the lower levels of the university system.
AU: One other big institution, which I think last I checked is almost a third of the entire system, is the Islamic Azad University. I’m not sure how Islamic it actually is. We had a guest on a while ago talking about private higher education, and he was saying that “Islamic” is a bit of a misnomer there. But it did have links to the regime when it was opened, because President Rafsanjani was one of the founders, as I understand it, or at least he was president of it at one point. What is this organization? How did it grow so big?
SG: Yes, it’s the Islamic Azad University, but “Islamic” is not entirely accurate. It’s not “Azad,” meaning free, because you have to pay tuition, and it’s not particularly Islamic in the sense that there is actually less ideological control there compared to the state universities. The environment is much more open compared to the state universities. But everything in Iran is controlled by the state. So regardless of whether an institution is semi-private or private, all of them are still controlled by the state.
They created Islamic Azad University to admit students who were not able to get into the public universities. After the 1979 revolution, there was huge demand for students to attend university, and the state universities were not able to meet that demand. So they created this semi-private system called Islamic Azad University.
AU: Perfect. So you talked about state control of universities, both public and so-called private institutions. But how does that work? I mean, is Iran like Russia, where the regime effectively has a veto at the level of selecting rectors? Is it that level of control, or is the control exerted through agencies like the Supreme Cultural Council that you talked about earlier?
SG: Iran actually is much closer to North Korea than Russia in terms of control. Iran is a proto-totalitarian regime, and I’ll explain how it works. Every university president has to be approved by the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, which is controlled by the Supreme Leader.
So these people are first picked by the Ministry of Higher Education or the Ministry of Health, and then the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution has to approve them. That approval comes from the top. After that, the president appoints the deans, and the deans appoint the heads of each college. At the department level, there is some very limited autonomy, but it’s extremely limited.
In terms of hiring faculty, everything is centralized in Iran and goes through political and ideological vetting. Not everyone is able to teach at a university. There is also massive ideological vetting for postgraduate students—both MA and PhD students.
There are also security institutions like the Basij, which operate under the control of the Ministry of Intelligence, present on university campuses. So in terms of curriculum, syllabi, management, hiring faculty, and admitting students to higher levels like MA and PhD programs, the system is directly controlled by the state.
You don’t see this level of control in Russia. There is much more autonomy in the Russian system. In Iran, it’s much closer to a totalitarian system where the state tries to control all aspects of education.
AU: Interesting. Now, until about eight years ago, higher education in Iran, I think in many ways, could have been described as a pretty big success story. You had rapidly growing enrolment. You had a research output system—I mean, Iran’s research output was growing faster than almost anyone else in the world.
It was about a twentyfold increase, much of it in the medical faculties, in about a fifteen-year period. And they did it without any kind of big excellence program like the 985 Program in China, or similar programs in Russia, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere. What explains that strong performance in the first couple of decades of the century?
SG: The strong performance in the 2000s was driven by a combination of factors: the expansion of universities, incentives provided by the state, national strategies, and more importantly the political environment at the time.
Around 2000, the Islamic Republic was still a theocratic republic, but it was not as personalized or securitized as it is now. After the Iran–Iraq war ended, the Islamic Republic expanded higher education, especially at the master’s and PhD levels. Many universities started PhD programs, and because demand was so high, the number of students in master’s and PhD programs increased. That led to more publications.
Policymakers at the time also tried to present scientific production as part of the country’s prestige, so they encouraged everyone to publish. Promotion was closely linked to publication—essentially, the more you published, the better your chances of advancement. All of this helped Iran expand its research output in the 2000s.
You also have to remember that Iran had a very deep pool of talented individuals, especially in STEM fields, and that helped the expansion.
That said, this expansion in the social sciences and humanities was not necessarily aligned with improvements in quality. In those fields, the increase in quantity did not always match the quality of education. But in the pure sciences—math and other STEM fields—the massive expansion of postgraduate programs, more students entering those programs, and state incentives for publishing all contributed to the growth we saw in the 2000s.
AU: And I guess that growth kind of peaked just before COVID, under my reading of the data, and things seem to have changed since. Around 2017 or 2018, enrolments started to fall quite quickly. Institutions are facing significant pressures, and you’ve got a lot of academics leaving academia or leaving Iran entirely.
Some of this, I assume, is about demography—a shrinking youth cohort—and some of it is about the effects of sanctions and broader economic stagnation in Iran. What’s your take on this? What are the really big challenges inside Iran’s universities right now?
SG: Part of the expansion of higher education happened during Ahmadinejad’s presidency, from 2005 to 2013. He was a populist leader, and he used the expansion of universities—often without thinking about quality—as a way to appeal to the Iranian people, to show that every Iranian, regardless of performance, could go to university.
From 2014, when the new government came to power, they realized there was not much quality in many of these semi-private universities. So they tried to scale them back and focus more on quality. That was the first change. The Rouhani government tried to close many of the universities that had popped up during the Ahmadinejad period. Second, as you mentioned, demography is a very important driver. There is less demand for universities because the birth rate in Iran has been declining.
But more importantly, the economy is another major factor. Inflation and declining incomes have changed how families think about higher education. A university degree is not seen as valuable as it once was, because you cannot easily get a job after graduating.
Sanctions—and more importantly economic mismanagement—have also reduced university budgets. Universities have lost access to labs and equipment, and they are not able to offer good salaries to faculty. As a result, many academics have started to emigrate, often to Persian Gulf countries where salaries are much higher. So we are seeing a very significant brain drain in Iran.
COVID was also important because it pushed universities toward online and remote education. But access to online education is unequal in Iran, especially because internet access is heavily controlled and often of poor quality.
All of this together led to a contraction in higher education—from about four million students in 2017 to about 3.5 million by 2020.
AU: Saeid, I want to turn now from the issue of universities to students, because I think when Iran makes the news internationally, it’s very often because of things its students are doing.
If you go back to the 1979 revolution, obviously that was a mass uprising. It wasn’t just students, but students were clearly active in the campaign to overthrow the Shah. And of course they played a key role in seizing the American Embassy in 1979. That was an act that strengthened Ayatollah Khomeini’s position and paved the way for clerical rule. So at the time, were most students pro-Khomeini, or was this just a group of students who happened to be pro-Khomeini? Was it the radicals who stormed the embassy almost 50 years ago now—was that representative of student opinion at the time or not?
SG: To be honest, from the creation of the modern university in Iran in 1934 until 1979, most students were leftist—Marxist or socialist—and belonged to different leftist student groups.
The Islamist students were actually a very small minority. But when we get closer to the 1979 revolution, the number of Islamist students began to grow. Still, when the revolution happened, the majority of students at universities belonged to leftist groups. There were Marxists, liberals, nativists, third-worldists, and Islamist groups.
The Islamist group had an advantage, because the Supreme Leader at that time and the state itself were Islamist. They tried to control universities, which were one of the last spaces they had not yet fully controlled.
With pressure from Khomeini and the new Islamic political elite, Islamist students were able to take over the American Embassy. They were a minority, but even at that time many leftist students supported the takeover because they saw the United States as an imperialist country.
AU: Because being leftist, they would be very anti-American. So that strategy of confrontation with the West would have been popular both with Islamists and Marxists.
SG: Absolutely right. Seizing the American Embassy was very popular among both Islamists and leftists. But the leftists soon realized that once the Islamists consolidated power, they began purging them from the universities. Through the Cultural Revolution between 1980 and 1983, more than 10,000 university faculty and more than 50,000 students—most of them leftists, liberals, or non-Islamists—were purged from the universities.
AU: Well since that time, of course, students have frequently found themselves in opposition to the government. The very large protests in July 1999 were largely student-led. Students also played prominent roles in the 2009 election protests, the 2022 “Women, Life, Freedom” protests, and those that occurred earlier this year. Why are students so consistently among the regime’s most persistent critics?
SG: Absolutely. From scholars like Samuel Huntington, we know that in dictatorships, when universities expand and more people attend them, students gradually become more informed and more connected. As a result, they begin to develop political demands.
This also happened in Iran. By the late 1990s—about two decades after the revolution—the number of students in universities had increased significantly. They were connected with each other, they were educated, and they were young. Naturally, they began asking for political reform and greater political freedom.
From 1999 to 2009, students were often at the front of protests demanding political reform and more political freedom. From 2017 until now, students have continued to be active, but this time not simply asking for reform. Instead, many are calling for the dismantling of the regime or regime change, because they have concluded that the regime is not reformable.
Students sit at the intersection of aspirations, radical ideas, and blocked opportunities. They go to university with hopes for the future, but when they graduate there are no jobs. At the same time, political repression is significant. Yet they are more informed and more connected than many other parts of society. At that point, students begin to realize that something is fundamentally wrong.
Historically, Iranian students have also been politically active. Even during the Pahlavi monarchy, from 1934 to 1979, students were challenging the state and engaging in political activism. As you mentioned, they played an important role in the 1979 revolution.
So there is a long history and institutional memory among Iranian students that universities are political spaces. And when you are living under a very repressive and often incompetent regime, there are few other avenues available for political action.
AU: And so tell me, how do students organize? Because you were saying earlier that universities are pretty tightly controlled politically. I’m assuming there aren’t a lot of open student elections in Iran the way you see in many countries. So how do protests get started on campus? Who organizes them?
And given controls on the internet and things like that, how do students manage to coordinate their actions so efficiently—not just within a single institution, but often across the entire country?
SG: Absolutely. First, going back to the idea of Iranian control, the Islamic Republic created many student organizations and associations that are connected to the state and operate within universities to create the appearance of civil society and non-governmental organizations.
Because of that, you don’t see many autonomous student organizations. There are a few, but they are heavily controlled. That’s why student protests in Iran are usually spontaneous.
Students are connected through social media and the internet, so they are able to communicate with each other. You often see small groups—dorm-based groups or small circles of friends—communicating with each other and then coming together to protest on university campuses. These gatherings then attract more and more students who are disappointed and dissatisfied with the regime and are waiting for an opportunity to protest.
So this is more of a passive network among students rather than an active organizational structure. Most formal student organizations are created by the state, such as the Basij student organizations or Islamic student associations.
In some ways, this decentralized structure has advantages. Because there is no hierarchy, the state cannot easily dismantle the movement by arresting a leader. But the problem is that mobilizing and organizing becomes very difficult, because the state can quickly shut down communication channels.
For example, as we saw recently, the state completely blocked social media apps. The internet was shut down, and even phone services were interrupted. When that happens, these flat networks collapse because they rely heavily on communication technologies.
AU: I’m not sure how much you can enlighten us about what happened in the last eight or ten weeks, because I understand it’s still difficult to get news out of Iran. But what actually happened on campuses during the January protests? My understanding is that there were certainly some conflicts on campuses—security forces entering dormitories at places like Tehran University. How did the crackdown unfold on campuses across the country?
SG: Based on the data we have, more than 130 students have been killed among the roughly 35,000 people who have allegedly been killed or injured in Iran since December 28, when a new wave of protests began—what many call the “great uprising.”
The trigger was economic problems, but as soon as people started coming into the streets, more and more joined because they were dissatisfied for many different reasons. Iran is politically repressive, economically struggling, and culturally closed. There are also major governance issues related to the environment—water scarcity, air pollution, and other problems. So there are many grievances.
From December 28 onward, as the protests began, we saw smaller protests emerge on university campuses across different cities. In response, on January 8 and 9, when the regime shut down the internet and cracked down on protests, the authorities immediately closed all the universities. Education was moved from physical, on-campus instruction to online learning.
Right now, most universities—especially the large ones—have shifted to online education, and even exams have been moved online. The idea is to limit the ability of students to gather.
Dormitories have remained open, but as you mentioned, many dorms in Tehran and other large cities were raided by security forces. Many students—around a thousand of them—have been arrested over the past month in an effort to silence student activism, because the government knows that students often act as a bridge between universities and the broader society.
AU: It’s—we’re recording this on February 20th—and I guess it’s been 42 days since the crackdown on January 9th. At least as far as I can tell, we haven’t seen much of the pattern that appeared in previous protest waves, where protests return after 40 days of mourning. Is that likely not to happen with this set of protests?
SG: Actually, the pattern of returning to protest after 40 days of mourning really comes from the 1979 revolution during the Pahlavi monarchy. At that time, the regime was not as repressive as the Islamic Republic. The Islamic Republic is a modern security state.
Interestingly, what we are seeing now is something slightly different—what we might call “fourth-day protests.” In Islamic tradition, the fourth day after the death of a loved one is an important moment when people gather to mourn. In recent days, we have seen that in many cities thousands of people have gathered for these fourth-day ceremonies and used them as opportunities to chant against the Islamic Republic.
I have studied political repression in Iran for about 25 years, and this is the first time I have seen something like this. Despite the killing of so many people, the protests have not completely silenced Iranian society. For the first time, we are seeing people continuing to chant against the Islamic Republic—from rooftops, behind their windows, and sometimes in the streets.
This is very interesting because it suggests that repression may be reaching a turning point. Even after such violence, many people are thinking that they cannot remain silent anymore.
From what I observe, as the fourteenth day after the January 8 and 9 crackdown approaches, people are still protesting—and in some places in larger numbers than before. Fear is turning into anger, and that will be important to watch in the future.
What I can say for sure is that the Islamic Republic is relying on massive repression. But that is not necessarily a stable or sustainable situation. People may return to the streets again.
AU: Sure. And I guess what struck me about the crackdown last month was that it seems like the regime is no longer even pretending that it can regain public favour. It now seems to be about maintaining control for as long as possible. So if economic crisis and political illegitimacy eventually lead to a moment of transition—maybe soon, maybe we have to wait for Ayatollah Khamenei to die—what role do you think students will play in that eventual transition? Will they act as the instigators of the revolution, as happened in Bangladesh two years ago, or will it be a broader-based movement with students as just one group among many?
SG: To clarify, we’ve seen student movements play major roles in places like Bangladesh and Nepal, and there has been a lot of discussion about that. But we have to remember that the Islamic Republic is not Bangladesh and it is not Nepal. In my opinion, the Islamic Republic is one of the most repressive political systems in the world.
I don’t usually compare it to North Korea because there are many things we don’t fully know about that system. But compared to countries like China or Russia, Iran is one of the most repressive, security-based regimes.
Because of that, the possibility of people coming out and changing the regime is very limited. As we have seen, the Islamic Republic is both able and willing to kill large numbers of its own citizens to stay in power.
However, if Khamenei dies, or if some kind of foreign intervention occurs, or if another kind of political transition happens, I think students will play an important role. They may not necessarily be the front runners of the protests, but they will almost certainly act as a bridge—between universities, the broader academic community, and other groups in society.
As we saw in 2022, students were part of a much broader movement of people who want to see a transition from the Islamic Republic to a more democratic and secular regime.
AU: Thanks so much for joining us today.
SG: Absolutely. Thank you very much for having me.
AU: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Sam Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan, and you—our readers and listeners—for joining us. If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode, or if you have suggestions for future ones, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Join us next week when our guest will be Lili Yang. She’s Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Hong Kong, and we’ll be talking about her recent book Higher Education, State and Society, comparing the Chinese and Anglo-American approaches. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
