Iran’s rulers have good reason to fear the reopening of the universities. On September 28, students at Allameh Tabataba’i University in Tehran poured onto their campus to protest against rising educational costs, compulsory hijab, deteriorating conditions, and the suffocating intrusion of security forces into university life. They demanded the release of imprisoned students. Videos showed protesters chanting against tyranny and the morality police. One slogan encapsulated their anger. “Neither barracks nor business enterprise. Long live the university.” That cry should reverberate through the corridors of power in Tehran.
Iran’s students are among the best educated young people in the Middle East. They study engineering, medicine, physics, computer science, law, economics, and the humanities. They inhabit the digital age. They see how their contemporaries live elsewhere. They know what freedom looks like, and they know what they are missing. They also know who stole their future. For decades, the clerical dictatorship has squandered Iran’s immense human and natural resources on repression at home and conflict abroad. Young Iranians have watched billions poured into the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its regional ambitions while their economy deteriorated and their opportunities disappeared. They have watched corruption flourish while families struggle. They have watched women beaten, arrested, and imprisoned for demanding basic rights. They have watched brilliant graduates contemplate emigration because their own country offers them unemployment, repression, and ideological conformity.
Most dangerously for the regime, they have learned to ask why. That question terrifies every dictatorship. The protest at Allameh did not emerge from nowhere. When universities reopened in February after the bloody January unrest, protests spread through Tehran University, Sharif University of Technology, Amirkabir, Beheshti, Al Zahra, Iran University of Science and Technology, and universities beyond the capital. Reuters reported renewed demonstrations and confrontations as the new semester began. Students commemorated those killed during the January protests. They challenged Basij forces. They demanded freedom. Security forces flooded campuses. The government warned students about crossing its “red lines.” At some universities, classes were shifted online.
Why such panic over students? Because the mullahs understand history.
Universities are dangerous places for dictators. Education encourages curiosity. Curiosity produces questions. Questions undermine propaganda. Once young people cease believing the lies of a dictatorship, intimidation becomes its principal means of survival.
Iran’s rulers have responded accordingly. Reports in June described a fresh wave of disciplinary action against students. According to reporting based on the Iranian newspaper Shargh, between five and seven students at Sharif faced expulsion orders and more than 20 faced suspensions. Other reports documented disciplinary proceedings and expulsions connected with student activism and social media activity. This is the mentality of a regime terrified of its own educated youth. It also explains why women students have become such a potent symbol of resistance. Young Iranian women study alongside men, qualify as doctors, engineers, scientists, and lawyers, then find themselves confronted by a medieval system that seeks to dictate how they dress and behave. The compulsory hijab has consequently become far more than a piece of cloth. It represents the state’s claim to ownership over the individual. The young women tearing down that claim are challenging the foundations of the theocracy.
Iran’s students also understand that their economic misery cannot be separated from the political system that created it. Their prospects have been sacrificed by years of corruption, mismanagement, repression, and military adventurism. A generation that should be building Iran’s future instead sees that future being destroyed before its eyes. The clerics can deploy Basij thugs onto campuses. They can summon students before disciplinary committees. They can expel them from universities. They can close dormitories, install surveillance cameras, and fill campuses with security agents. But they cannot force an educated generation to unlearn what it knows.
That is the regime’s fundamental problem. Iranian students know that their country could be prosperous. They know Iran possesses vast energy resources, an ancient culture and an exceptionally talented population. They know millions of Iranians abroad have excelled in science, medicine, technology, business, and academia. They ask the obvious question. Why should the same people be denied opportunity inside Iran? The answer lies in a political system whose survival depends upon repression. The protests at Allameh therefore matter far beyond one university. They form part of a pattern stretching from the January uprising through the renewed campus demonstrations in February, subsequent disciplinary crackdowns and now the beginning of another academic year. Whatever their immediate trigger, campus grievances repeatedly expand into demands concerning freedom, political prisoners, women’s rights, and the character of the state itself.
The universities are becoming incubators of dissent. Students possess something dictatorships find extraordinarily difficult to suppress. Networks. Ideas. Courage. Memory. They remember those arrested. They remember those killed. They remember the women beaten for removing their hijab. And they understand that tyranny survives when fear overwhelms solidarity. That equation is changing. The next great uprising in Iran may begin in the bazaar, a factory, a neighborhood, or a university. No one can know where or when that moment will come. But when it does, Iran’s students will surely be among the forces shaping it. They have the education to understand what has gone wrong. They have the technology to communicate. They have the courage to challenge authority. Above all, they have something the aging clerical establishment can never give them. A future worth fighting for.
The mullahs should fear the universities. Behind those campus gates stands a generation that has seen through their propaganda, rejected their misogyny, and grown weary of paying for their corruption and wars. Iran’s students want their country back. And history suggests that when an educated generation loses its fear of a dictatorship, the dictatorship has every reason to fear that generation.
Struan Stevenson was a member of the European Parliament representing Scotland (1999-2014), president of the Parliament's Delegation for Relations with Iraq (2009-14), and chairman of the Friends of a Free Iran Intergroup (2004-14). He is an author and international lecturer on the Middle East.