Over President Ahmadi-nejad’s objections, the regime last year ordered universities to segregate classes by gender as primary and secondary schools have long done.
Many universities announced a phase-in, with upper classes remaining co-ed this year while the freshmen class was segregated. That would eliminate co-education in four years.
The Iran Times, however, has not seen a survey of how the process is going. Smaller campuses, for example, that have only one dining hall now will have to build a new and separate dining hall and some academics have complained that it will be impossible to segregate all classes, pointing to specialized classes that only draw a dozen students a year.
Mohammad Mehdi Maza-heri, deputy chancellor of Azad for cultural affairs, told ISNA, “Good things have been done for launching single gender universities. So far, six single gender units have been opened by Islamic Azad University.”
Islamic Azad University was started just after the revolution on the initiative of Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani in an effort to vastly expand the availability of higher education for Iranians.
With 1.9 million students today, it is rated the third largest university system in the world.
In Iran, the school has about 400 separate locations, so it was presumably not difficult the university to make six sites all-female. Mazaheri didn’t say if males were just booted off six existing campus sites or if whole new all-female campuses were created.
Mazaheri said, “The implementation of Islamic rules in universities, the expansion of Islamic principles and the creation of a religious atmosphere are among the most important activities of the university’s cultural program.”
