Iran’s universities have long been a battleground, where protests happen and students fight for the future

Iran’s current wave of protests^[1] continues to spread across the country, as the United States weighs military intervention^[2]. Meanwhile, many Iranian people^[3] continue to struggle to pay for basic necessities amid a collapsing currency.

The anti-government demonstrations^[4] began in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, one of the largest and oldest covered markets in the world, in December 2025. From there, they quickly reached Iran’s university campuses^[5].

The government’s response was swift and familiar: Authorities ordered universities^[6] to move classes online, citing weather concerns. When students continued organizing, the regime closed universities^[7] entirely.

I am an Iranian-American who has studied^[8] Iranian social movements for more than 25 years. As an educator, I have also led American universities, while maintaining ties to Iranian academic institutions.

I also witnessed firsthand the systematic assault on academic freedom during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from 2005 through 2013^[9].

Iran’s universities tell the story of the nation itself: a story of persistent hope confronting relentless repression, and of intellectual life refusing to be extinguished even under extraordinary pressure.

Iranian universities have long been^[10] places of political reform and imagination – and where the Islamic Republic’s authoritarian impulses collide with people’s demands for freedom.

The heartbeat of reform

Iran has 316^[11] accredited universities across the country, including the University of Tehran^[12] and Islamic Azad University.

Iranian universities have been hubs of political activity and protest since at least the mid-1900s.

Student-led protest movements emerged forcefully in the 1940s following the abdication of Reza Shah^[13], an Iranian military officer who led Iran^[14] as its shah, or monarch, from 1925 to 1941.

These groups gained momentum during the oil nationalization movement led by the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Students supported Mossadegh’s^[15] promises of a democratic and free Iran, where the benefits of resources – like oil – would be reaped by Iranians first, before extending to the rest of the world.

The United States led a CIA-backed military coup^[16] that overthrew Mossadegh and reinstated Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as shah of Iran in 1953^[17].

College campuses again became critical spaces for political consciousness and opposition.

A long-established pattern

This pattern continued for decades. Universities were central to the 1979 revolution^[18], with students joining clerics, leftists and nationalists in overthrowing the monarchy.

Yet once consolidated, the Islamic Republic quickly turned against the institutions that had helped make the revolution possible.

The 1980s and 1990s saw widespread purges of faculty, with the imprisonment of professors in such numbers that the notorious Evin Prison came to be grimly nicknamed “Evin University^[19].”

Academic life was tightly policed, books were routinely banned, and government surveillance became routine. As Azar Nafisi later documented in the 2003 book “Reading Lolita in Tehran^[20],” intellectual engagement often survived only through clandestine reading groups and private gatherings.

Yet repression never succeeded in erasing student activism. When formal organizing became impossible, it moved underground. When campuses were locked down, ideas continued to circulate.

Thaw, reversal and academic repression

The election of^[21] Mohammad Khatami in 1997^[22] briefly altered this trajectory of academic repression.

Khatami ran for office as a reformist candidate with strong support from young people^[23]. As president, he presided over a limited thaw in academic life. Universities reopened slightly as spaces for debate and research.

I conducted fieldwork on the youth movement and sexual revolution in Iran beginning in 1999 – research that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier.

But the opening proved fragile. Ahmadinejad’s rise to power in 2005^[24] marked a return to aggressive repression. Universities were again treated as ideological threats. Some faculty members^[25] were arrested^[26] or dismissed, student organizations^[27] were dismantled, and coursework and readings were heavily censored.