the daily Sharq reported Sunday, with history, for example, being available only to one sex as a major.
The Sharq story struck many as questionable and it has not yet been confirmed by any university.
According to Sharq, the universities are making 40 majors either all-male or all-female in an effort to pursue gender-segregation.
The daily said the majors impacted included sociology, history, literature, mining, arts education and mathematics. “There’s something wrong here,” one observer cautioned. “How can you open history only to one gender.”
Universities were ordered several months ago to devise plans for segregating the sexes. But some weeks ago, President Ahmadi-nejad denounced that policy and ordered his science minister, who oversees higher education, to stop it. Science Minister Kamran Daneshju said he would follow the president’s instructions.
The first university to announce a segregation plan earlier this summer said it would segregate all classes for incoming freshmen this year and then advance segregation by one class one year at a time.
The concept of opening majors only to one gender or the other was not known to even be under discussion. Furthermore, as critics pointed out, that arrangement would not lead to segregated classes. “Suppose you make history a major only for women,” said one. “Won’t men in other majors still be expected to take history courses? You no longer have a university if you ban men from taking any history courses and women from taking any literature courses. This doesn’t make sense.”
Sharq said that among the 20 universities to follow this segregation policy are such major schools as the University of Tehran and Amir Kabir University plus Esfahan, Mohaghegh Ardebili, Zabil, Shiraz Arts and Tabriz Sahand.
A separate report in the daily Etemad said Tehran’s Allameh Tabatabai University has totally eliminated 13 branches of the humanities as part of the scheme launched by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi to remove Western thought from university curricula.
Etemad said the following fields have been eliminated by Allameh Tabatabai and that other universities were expected to follow suit: journalism; political science; sociology; history; philosophy; communications; pedagogy; accounting; administration; education administration; pedagogy for special needs; early childhood education; and economics.
The fields that will remain are law, Arabic language and literature, Persian language and literature, theology and Islamic studies, tourism administration, and ECO insurance.
Many eyebrows were raised and many doubts expressed that even the most reactionary of revolutionaries would actually suggest eliminating all course-work in history and philosophy. Some suggested the news reports were actually intended to shock the public in an effort to rally public opinion against major changes in the curricula.