The new power brokers in Iran are wasting no time shaking up the country’s universities. The Ahmadi-nejad choice for chancellor of the giant Azad University system was fired last week and replaced by the choice of the Rafsanjani family.
In addition, Jafar Tofiqi, the acting minister of science who oversees higher education, has announced the end of the practice of suspending or expelling students who took part in the 2009 post-election protests.
And the new chancellor of Tehran’s Allameh Tabatabai University, Hassan Salimi, said that some of the professors forced into retirement by the old administration have been hired back. Salimi did not, however, say how many professors had been forced into retirement or how many had been hired back.
Forced retirements were used at many universities by the Ahmadi-nejad Administration as it sought to clean out faculty members who had supported Ahmadi-nejad’s opponents in the 2009 elections.
Chancellor Salimi last week said he was also ending the practice of “starring” the files of students who were implicated in the 2009 post-election protests and suspending or even expelling them. That policy has since been made a national policy by the acting science minister.
At Azad University, which has the third largest student body in the world, the change was swift. It appeared that one member of the Board of Trustees read the handwriting on the wall and shifted from the conservative side to the reformist side of the ledger.
Back in January 2012, the Board voted 5-4 to fire the Rafsanjani family’s choice for chancellor and replaced him with Farhad Daneshju, who just coincidentally happened to be the brother of Kamran Daneshju, who was President Ahmadi-nejad’s minister of science, the man who oversees higher education in Iran.
Last week, the Board of Trustees voted to remove Chancellor Daneshju, after just 19 months of his four-year term, and replace him with Hamid Mirzadeh.
The change was announced by Yasser Hashemi, who recently replaced his father, former President Rafsanjani, as chairman of the Board of Trustees.
Azad University was created by Rafsanjani shortly after the revolution and has been one of his pet institutions ever since. Rafsanjani’s goal was to broaden higher education so that everyone who wanted to attend college could do so, shifting from the much more selective system used under the monarchy.
But, in January 2012, the Ahmadi-nejad faction moved to take control. In a surprise vote, the Board of Trustees deposed Chancellor Abdollah Jasbi, the only leader the university had ever known, and replaced him with Farhad Daneshju.
Jasbi has always been a strong supporter of Rafsanjani, which made him a target of conservatives. 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 had become a battleground between Ahmadi-nejad and Rafsanjani. Rafsanjani won every round until Ahmadi-nejad was able to get a few of his choices on the Board of Trustees.
Rafsanjani was the chief sponsor of the university, helping to create it in 1982. It had been controlled by his friends and family from then until last year. After taking office in 2005, Ahmadi-nejad tried to break the Rafsanjani hold on the university, which Ahmadi-nejad apparently saw as a major base of Raf-sanjani’s influence over government and politics in Iran.
After the 2009 presidential election, the Ahmadi-nejad camp became even more eager to take over Azad. Critics said 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 had grown quiet.
In 2011, Rafsanjani lost his chairmanship of the Assembly of Experts, the body that selects a new Supreme Leader when the post falls vacant. In December 2011, Rafsanjani’s politically active daughter, Faezeh, was sentenced to six months in jail for propagandizing against the Islamic system of government. The ouster of Jasbi was one more step in the pincers movement to eclipse Rafsanjani’s power.
But that effort was halted by last June’s presidential election, and the vote to oust Daneshju was one step back up the ladder for Rafsanjani and his clan.
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.
