Purged professors returning to Iranian universities?

A lecturer purged in the wake of the Woman, Life, Freedom protests has confirmed that he has been allowed to return to work, sparking hopes that tens of others who suffered the same fate may also be reinstated.

Ali Sharifi-Zarchi, a former member of the bioinformatics and AI Faculty of the Sharif Industrial University, took to X Monday to announce that the decision to allow him to teach again after a year has been finalized.

When asked about Sharifi-Zarchi’s case by Mehr News Agency on Monday, the university’s chancellor, Abbas Mousavi neither confirmed nor denied his reinstatement but promised to comment in the coming days. 

Sharifi-Zarchi backed dissident students during the months-long nationwide protests sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini in September 2022. He also disclosed that authorities were recruiting politically "endorsed" academics to replace critical academics. Thousands of students and alumni of the university signed a petition in his support.

The return of tens of purged academics is one of the major popular demands that the newly established government of the pro-reform Masoud Pezeshkian and its minister of science, research, and technology (higher education), Hossein Simaei Sarraf are facing.

Simaei-Sarraf, 56, is a lawyer, politician, and university professor who served as the Cabinet Secretary in Hassan Rouhani’s administration between 2019 and 2021.

The Islamic Association of Students at Sharif Industrial University published an open letter to the new minister on Monday, reminding him of his promise to “restore the dignity of academia.” They urged him to reinstate the dismissed professors and take steps to reconcile with them.

The new minister on Tuesday sacked a hardliner faculty dean at Allameh Tabatabei University for calling Mahsa Amini “a Kurdish Sunni girl who went six feet under” in a derogatory tone in a recent interview with the state-run television (IRIB).

Amini’s death in custody of morality police for hijab sparked nationwide protests that lasted for several months.

Ardeshir Entezari’s tone angered many Iranians including the Kurdish and Sunni minority groups.

The government of hardliner Ebrahim Raisi purged tens of prominent professors and lecturers in the summer of 2023. Some were sacked, some were forced to retire early, and others were refused a renewal of their contracts. The government also installed hardliners in most universities as chancellors.

The purge in academia began after the protests, but Mohsen Borhani, a professor of criminal law at Tehran University, told the reformist daily Etemad at the time that the Raisi administration had decided to eliminate dissident professors shortly after he took office in August 2021.

Borhani was among the professors purged last year because he had used social media to criticize the execution of four young protesters a few months after Amini’s death.

The purge of academia has a long history in the Islamic Republic that a few months after the Revolution of 1979 launched a “cultural revolution” and shut down universities for nearly three years to purge thousands of professors and students.

In August 2023, the reformist Etemad newspaper published a list of around 157 tenured professors dismissed, forced into retirement, or banned from teaching for their dissenting views since 2006.

The purge was widely attributed to President Ebrahim Raisi’s ultra-hardliner allies who aimed to assert their dominance in the political arena by ousting other politicians, officials, and academics.

Hardliners denied the allegations that purging academics was based on their political beliefs. Instead, they accused those dismissed of “moral issues” and some had been sued by students over “ethical matters”.

A similar purge affected thousands of school principals and even clerics in seminaries during a process that came to be called “purification”.