Dethroning the Shah in His University: The Rise and Developments of Student Activism at Aryamehr University of Technology (1966-1979)

• In Event: Neocolonial, critical feminist and anti-racist perspectives on international cooperation, education policy, and higher education

Proposal

Introduction, Research Questions, and Method
Despite a growing body of interdisciplinary research on student activism in diverse global contexts (Heffernan & Nieftgodien, 2016; Hodgkinson & Melchiorre, 2019; Pensado, 2015; Woodcock, 2020), there are relatively few empirical and archival studies on student movements in Iran. While the activism of Iranian student groups in the U.S. and Europe, their transnational networks and global solidarities against U.S. Imperialism have been extensively studied (Matin-asgari, 2002; Nasrabadi, 2014; Aquilina, 2011; Shawkat, 2012), there is a scarcity of studies in English on the student movement inside Iran. In this paper we seek to address this gap by focusing on pre-revolutionary Iran, and focus on student activism within a prominent technical university in the nation’s capital, Aryamehr University of Technology (AUT). Notably, AUT was the most prestigious engineering university and simultaneously one of the most significant sites of protest against the Pahlavi regime (1925-1979). In this research, we draw on 1) archival records held at AUT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the declassified records obtained from the U.S. Embassy and Iran’s Intelligence and Security Organization, and 2) oral histories conducted with former faculty, administration, and students, to examine the politicization of students and faculty at AUT. We analyze Iranian engineering students’ activism against U.S. imperialism and Iran’s growing militarism and authoritarianism.
Historical Background
During the Cold War, Iran was the southern neighbor to the Soviet Union. It was a strategic ally for the U.S. in its policy of containment. The “White Revolution” was a series of early 1960s state-sponsored reforms, initiated by the U.S. and adopted and directed by Iran’s Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919-1979). The objective of these reforms was to reduce the threat and allure of a Communist uprising in the country as well as to foster industrialization in Iran (Abrahamian, 1982). A key element of the “White Revolution” was educational reform. U.S. universities, which had already developed their international contracts with Iranian universities as part of the Point Four mission, and U.S. educational aid programs dating back to the 1950s (Garlitz, 2012), played major roles during this period of educational reform and policy making.
In this context, the establishment of AUT in 1966 was in line with the Shah’s political, economic, and educational agendas, replacing the formerly semi-autonomous French-modeled higher education with a state-controlled American model (Mojab, 1991). Moreover, AUT was founded to respond to the increasing need for technicians and engineers in response to the growing industrialization projects, most notably the Esfahan Steel Mill (established in 1965). In the 1970s, the Pahlavi regime allocated a major amount out of its revenue from the oil price boom to sponsor several joint military and industrial projects between the U.S. and Iran. U.S. universities and other educational institutions such as MIT, Georgetown University, and Michigan State University also established joint ventures with their Iranian counterparts to train engineers, technicians, and army officers (Gupte, 1975). MIT and AUT began negotiations to develop working affiliations, which resulted in an agreement for a Program of Collaboration between MIT and AUT in 1974 (MIT, Gordon S. Brown Papers, Box 6). This was concurrent with the rise of student and anti-imperialist activism of the 1970s which had targeted and highlighted Mohammd Reza Pahlavi’s authoritarian legacy globally and in the U.S. (Shannon, 2017).
Focus of this Study and Emerging Findings
This study carefully examines social justice activism at AUT from its founding in 1966 to the revolution in 1979. During these years, despite its formal relationship to the Shah’s royal court, AUT became a highly politicized educational environment. Students and faculty at AUT, in line with other leading institutions of higher education in Iran, had wide-ranging demands across a range of social, economic, and political issues. Their demands and politics radicalized in the early 1970s to include freedom of assembly, academic freedom, freedom of expression, and the overthrow of the Shah’s monarchical regime. During this decade several AUT students, professors and alumni even played leading theoretical and organizational roles in the Marxist and Islamist armed struggle movements against the Shah (Haqshinas, 2020; Ebrahimzadeh, 2021).
Contextualizing the establishment of AUT within Iran’s “White Revolution” and the broader geopolitics of the Cold War, our paper draws on archival records as well as oral histories to examine the objectives, approaches, ideologies, and modes of anti-imperialism as reflected in student activism. We are attuned here to the relation between imperialism and Iranian State’s autocratic policies, and the extent to which student activism was directed at the growing militarism of the Pahlavi regime in 1970’s and the role of U.S. institutions of higher education in supporting and training Iranian personnel, technicians, and engineers. While the research and analysis are ongoing, the data collection and early analyses demonstrate certain tensions within student activism, and diverse and contested conceptualization of imperialism, and anti-imperialist activism which need to be contextualized in national and international socio-political developments.
Implications
This paper has implications for how we understand historical and contemporary student activism in Iran, and creates a critical space to study contemporary activism in relation to the past. Moreover, this study examines the processes of Americanization in the higher education field in the context of an autocratic state, and the ways these processes were experienced by faculty and students. Our research contributes to recovering a suppressed history of Iranian student activism in the years directly preceding the revolution, and also deepens our understanding of US-Iran relations, with a specific focus on the role of educational institutions. By understanding specifically how AUT students were engaged in social justice activism, and how their conceptions of empire and anti-imperialism were informed by and mediated through the broader political discourse of the time, we further gain an appreciation for their praxis of solidarity building, and the ways they radicalized formal and informal learning spaces.

Authors

• Mahdi Ganjavi, Northwestern University

• Sepehr Vakil, Northwestern University