Older But Food for Thought: How Will Universities Respond to a Post-Ayatollah Iran?

Behind mass protests in Iran and the regime’s bloody crackdown looms a sense of change coming to the Middle East. While Democrats and Republicans sparred over immigration raids in Minneapolis and another potential government shutdown, Trump sent an “armada” to the Persian Gulf, seemingly to make good on his warning to the Islamic Republic’s theocrats to not hurt protesters. Of those protesters, the Iranian government under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei murdered up to 30,000 of them. With the Trump administration meeting Israeli and Saudi officials who discuss striking Iran, presumably once and for all, a transformed Middle East is something that the West, and the West’s own anti-Western universities, must grasp. Just as young Persians risk life and limb on the streets of Tehran for a freer future, a look back at how academia treated the Shah may indicate what awaits a post-theocratic Iran at American universities. The hostility Israel faces on American campuses is no secret, but once upon a time, when Iran was an American ally, the Shah faced just as much campus hate. 

For American foreign policy, thwarting Eurasian hegemony in the form of the Soviet Union during the Cold War or China today requires the Middle East.

In the 1970s, Iran was one of the two central pillars of the Nixon Doctrine’s “Twin Pillar” strategy, alongside Saudi Arabia, serving as a bulwark against Soviet communism in the Middle East. Following the CIA-backed coup that overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, became one of the West’s strongest allies in the Middle East. Prime Minister or not, Mossadegh was no saint. From the vantage point of a post-Maduro Venezuela, compliments of the Trump administration, Mossadegh’s policies in the early 1950s, such as the nationalization of oil, property confiscation, claiming emergency powers, and his fluctuating political proximity to Iran’s then-pro-Communist Tudeh Party, seem reminiscent of Hugo Chavez. Once Mossadegh was removed and the Shah returned to power, the monarchy became a reliable, if self-interested, ally.

The Shah was surprisingly liberal, though anti-Shah protesters in the 1970s were unwilling to grant the monarchy any credit. Student protests held by the Iranian Student Association (ISA) at Ohio State University (OSU) in 1979 chanted slogans of “Down with US imperialism.” ISA protest posters from demonstrations in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco in 1977 show an American plane dropping bombs on Iran alongside slogans such as “Shah is a US Puppet,” and “Down with the Shah.” Declaring the “Shah is a fascist butcher!” was a common refrain of revolution-minded students in the 70s. Revolutionary zeal often breeds moral confidence while dulling moral judgment and intellectual rigor.