Iran’s continues to spread across the country, as the United States . Meanwhile, continue to struggle to pay for basic necessities amid a collapsing currency.
The began in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, one of the largest and oldest covered markets in the world, in December 2025. From there, they quickly .
The government’s response was swift and familiar: to move classes online, citing weather concerns. When students continued organizing, the entirely.
I am an Iranian-American who 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 .
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 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 accredited universities across the country, including the 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 , an 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 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 that overthrew Mossadegh and reinstated Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as shah of Iran .
College campuses again became critical spaces for political consciousness and opposition.
A long-established pattern
This pattern continued for decades. Universities were , 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 “.”
Academic life was tightly policed, books were routinely banned, and government surveillance became routine. As Azar Nafisi later documented in the 2003 book “,” 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 briefly altered this trajectory of academic repression.
Khatami ran for office as a reformist candidate with . 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. marked a return to aggressive repression. Universities were again treated as ideological threats. Some or dismissed, were dismantled, and coursework and readings were heavily censored.
The irony was stark. By the mid-2000s, Iran had one of the in the region.
Yet the government began restricting which majors women could study and which subjects could be taught. , including engineering, education and counseling, were deemed suspect. Professors who resisted faced harassment and dismissal. Student protests were met with .
Despite this, youth-led mobilization persisted. Every over the past two decades – including the – has been driven by young people, many of them university students.
Universities in the current uprising
Recent Iranian university closures underscore the regime’s likely fears of resistance – not simply because of what is taught in classrooms, since curricula can be controlled – but also because of the power that young people can gain when in shared spaces.
Dormitories, libraries and cafeterias are where political awareness coalesces, where individual grievances become collective demands, and where dissent acquires momentum.
Today, by systematically alienating young people through economic mismanagement, social repression and the erosion of academic freedom, the government has created its : young protesters. Analysts have increasingly identified this pattern as one of the regime’s central .
Universities are a lens into Iran
What happens inside Iran’s universities today is not a side story – it is one of the clearest indicators of where the country may be headed.
The freedom to teach, read, question and debate mirrors the freedom Iranian citizens seek in public life more broadly. Just as women have pushed back against state control of their bodies , universities have pushed back against intellectual confinement one page at a time – expanding the boundaries of permissible thought even under threat of punishment.
For decades, Iranian students and professors have demonstrated extraordinary courage in sustaining these small but vital acts of defiance. They have kept alive what Iranians call “ that endures even in darkness.
that societies which wage war on their intellectual institutions ultimately lose more than control – they lose legitimacy. Iran’s universities have long been the heartbeat of reform. Today, that heartbeat is growing louder – and it may once again shape the course of the nation’s history.
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