Iran Focus
London, 11 November – The Iranian Regime has begun to officially vet master’s and doctoral candidates at their universities to test their commitment to the ideology of the Iranian Regime.
Anyone who fails the vetting process will be barred from entering further education regardless of their qualifications.
Hamid Mirzadeh, the dean of the Islamic Azad University of Iran, stated that all students would be vetted by the Ministry of Intelligence.
The Supreme Committee of the Cultural Revolution has screened 114,000 candidates in 2016 alone.
Reza Parchizadeh, a political analyst who graduated from the University of Tehran, wrote on Algemeiner that this was a violation of human rights in Iran and a threat to the freedom of education in Iran.
Parchizadeh wrote: “If this overarching trend of social engineering is allowed to go on, in a few years all the Iranian academy’s output will simply produce automaton-like regime functionaries, 1984-style.”
Of course, the Iranian Regime has been vetting academics and putting restrictions on their activities since 1979. In the early 1980s, they purged the “Westernized” professors, students and staff from their universities; many were expelled or arrested but some were tortured and killed.
The Regime has also closed various programs that were deemed “anti-Islamic” including law, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and political science; they were replaced with courses that portrayed the Regime in a positive light and advocated anti-Western sentiments.
In recent years, they’ve also targeted foreign languages and literature courses and introduced gender segregation across the courses.
The Regime claimed that this would “purify” the educational institutions.
