decided last Wednesday to depose Chancellor Abdollah Jasbi, the only leader the university has ever known, and replace him with Farhad Daneshju.
The university was founded 29 years ago with a strong push from Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani. Outgoing Chancellor Jasbi has always been a strong supporter of Rafsanjani, which made him a target of conservatives.
Incoming Chancellor Daneshju is reported to be close to President Ahmadi-0nejad.
The vote on replacing Jasbi with Daneshju was 5-4. Among the four dissenters were Rafsanjani and Hossain Khomeini, the grandson of the leader of the revolution.
Azad University has been a battleground between Ahmadi-nejad and Rafsanjani for years. Rafsanjani won every round until last week. As he no longer holds a board majority, Rafsanjani’s tenure as board chairman may soon be over.
Rafsanjani was the chief sponsor of the university, helping to create it in 1982. It has been controlled by his friends and family ever since. Since taking office in 2005, Ahmadi-nejad has tried to break the Rafsanjani hold on the university, which Ahmadi-nejad apparently sees as a major base of Rafsanjani’s influence over government and politics in Iran.
Since the 2009 presidential election, the Ahmadi-nejad camp has been even more eager to take over Azad. They say it was used as a base for campaigning by the reformist opposition. And many of the post-election protests came from Azad campuses when the rest of the university community was quiet.
Last year, Rafsanjani lost his chairmanship of the Assembly of Experts, the body that selects a new Supreme Leader when the post falls vacant. Two weeks ago, Rafsanjani’s politically active daughter, Faezeh, was sentenced to six months in jail for propagandizing against the Islamic system of government.
Azad has grown swiftly to become Iran’s largest university with 1.7 million students at 400 branches nationwide. It is believed to have the third largest university enrollment in the world.