Iranian Leader Urges Purge of Liberal Faculty

By Gwendolyn Bradley

The president of Iran in September called for a purge of liberal and secular faculty members from the country’s universities, according to the Associated Press. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoted Auby the official Iranian news agency as telling a group of students that they “should shout at the president and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities.” Ahmadinejad, head of the country’s Council of Cultural Revolution, has direct authority over universities.

Concerned about Ahmadinejad’s statement as well as about reports that dozens of liberal faculty members may have been pressured to retire because of political considerations, AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen wrote in October to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s “supreme leader.”

“To continue to contribute substantively to your country’s development, faculty members must be able to exercise freedom of thought, opinion, and speech,” Bowen wrote. “We therefore ask that your government abandon its call for the exclusion of academics based on their research or findings and to ensure that no faculty members are forced to retire because of their scholarship or publicly stated views.”

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