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Universities at Center of Protests

Iran: In wake of disputed elections, Iranian-American scientists condemn crackdown on university campuses

As mass protests in Iran continued last week in the wake of the country’s hotly disputed presidential election, Iranian scientists living in the US condemned violent attacks on university campuses by Iranian security forces.

Iranian officials maintain that the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the June 12 election by an overwhelming margin. As demonstrators alleging electoral fraud took to the streets, the Iranian government sought to quell opposition, particularly on university campuses.

Members of the Iranian security forces have raided universities and many student dormitories in Iran. In one of the dormitories in Tehran, several students have been killed, according to a letter published in the July issue of the American Physicists Society’s APS News by the board of directors of the APS’s Iranian-American Physicists group. In that letter, the group condemned “such violent t attacks on the universities and student dormitories.”

Iranian officials have severely curbed international journalists’ activities in Iran, and as a result much of the information trickling out of the country has come from social networking sites such as Twitter. In the week following the election, there were reports on the site of mass resignations by faculty in the chemistry department at the nation’s leading science and engineering university, Sharif University of Technology.   

These rumors “are not true,” says Fredun Hojabri, a former chemistry professor and academic vice-president at SUT who now lives in San Diego. “It would be also not a right move to resign and let the government control the university.”

SUT has been closed for more than a week and its final exams postponed to beginning of July, according to Hojabri, who remains in contact with former colleagues and friends at SUT and elsewhere in Iran. “The faculty is concerned and doesn’t know what will happen next,” he says. The chair of the chemistry department and other faculty members at the university declined to speak with C&EN for this article.  

Before the election, 125 SUT professors, including 14 from the department of chemistry and 8 from chemical engineering, issued a declaration criticizing the Ahmadinejad administration’s management of the country, particularly its economy.—Amanda Yarnell