University Students Under the Dagger of Second “Cultural Revolution”

When, speaking to a group of university students, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused the country’s educational system of being subservient to secular interests for more than 150 years, and called on students to cooperate in overhauling the country’s educational system, perhaps few people thought that, in less than a year, the country’s universities would face conditions similar to the “cultural revolution” of the 1980s.

Last year, in a meeting with university students, Ahmadinejad said that students must fight against liberal ideals and liberal markets. Ahmadinejad voiced his criticism of the 150 year rule of secularism over universities when, not 150 years ago, but in May of 1980, the Supreme Council for Cultural Revolution (SCCR) temporarily shut down universities and higher education facilities in order to reform the country’s educational system. As Iran’s universities remained closed for more than 30 months, the SCCR defined a new framework for organizing the educational system and implemented programs including establishing university Jihad programs, promoting new Islamic courses, permanently shutting down some universities, removing university officials from their posts, setting up new criteria for appointing professors to university boards, creating the center for university publications and a committee to “Islamicize” universities, overhauling the study abroad program, and so on.

More than 26 years later, experts, politicians, intellectuals and policy-makers are still debating about the overall effects of such programs on the production of knowledge and promotion of research and development. Abdolmajid Maadikhah, who served as the minister of culture and Islamic guidance in the Bahonar government (1981), says, “In the absence of academic research on the effects of the cultural revolution of the 1980s, the full effects of those measures are not clear enough to convince us to undertake a second cultural revolution.”

Maadikhah told ILNA, “In our country no academic work is done on analyzing the effects of past actions, such as the cultural revolution of the 1980s. Thus we cannot use lessons from past experience to make future policy in running the country or increasing public participation.”

This former politician and current historian adds, “Saying random things about the past does not solve any problems. Apparently, academic methods have not yet been recognized as legitimate ways of extracting lessons from past experience.”

It seems as if the administration’s recent discourse of implementing a second cultural revolution is being used as a tool to suppress student activism in universities. It is certain, however, that repeating the experience of another cultural revolution is impossible, as many influential and important forces within the regime oppose such measures and the cost of implementing them is very high.