05/21/2026
AIS Panel: "Universities Under Fire: War, Scholasticide, and Academic Freedom in Iran"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRYWmuCrnyQ
This panel examined how universities in Iran have become sites of layered violence – bombings, sanctions, and internal repression – rather than protected spaces of learning. Dr. Mina Khanlarzade traced a trajectory from the assassination of scientists since 2007 to the 2025-26 bombings of major campuses, showing how sanctions, fear, and securitization have turned science into a battlefield, while both Israeli and Islamic Republic narratives militarize universities and erase their accountability to society. She argued that defending Iranian universities requires condemning bombings and assassinations, opposing isolationist sanctions, and resisting the Islamic Republic’s own securitization and ex*****ons, while reconnecting with Iran’s lost intellectual traditions that critiqued militarized and capitalist science. Dr. Ali Banuazizi emphasized the long history of student opposition, the unprecedented scale and gender composition of today’s student body, and the desperation of millions of youths without work or study, insisting that scholars must condemn foreign attacks without ignoring the regime’s Cultural Revolution–era purges and ongoing repression. Mr. Kourosh Ziabari analyzed how years of dehumanizing rhetoric and media narratives, including in the diaspora, have normalized sanctions and made the bombing of universities thinkable under “dual‑use” logic, while Western political discourse erases distinctions between state and society. Across the panel, speakers converged on the idea of a “triple defense” of Iranian universities against foreign military violence, economic isolation, and internal security‑state repression, while centering students and reviving Iran’s own critical intellectual traditions as key to imagining a different future for higher education.
Speaker Bios:
Dr. Mina Khanlarzadeh is an Iranian historian whose work focuses on modern Middle Eastern intellectual and cultural history, especially Iran. She studies gender, sexuality, nationalism, translation, and postcolonial theory, with particular attention to how ideas of modernity and “the West” shaped Iranian political thought. She is currently a faculty member at Deep Springs College.
Dr. Ali Banuazizi is Research Professor of Political Science at Boston College and Affiliated Faculty at the Center for International Studies at M.I.T. After receiving his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1968, he taught at Yale and the University of Southern California before joining the Boston College Faculty in 1971. Since then, he has held visiting appointments at the University of Tehran, Princeton, Hebrew University, Harvard, Oxford University, and M.I.T. He served as the founding editor of the Journal of Iranian Studies, from 1968 to 1982. He is a past president of the Association for Iranian Studies (AIS) and of the Middle East Studies Association in North America (MESA).
Mr. Kourosh Ziabari is a journalist and media studies researcher based in New York. A contributor to New Lines Magazine and Foreign Policy, he is an alumnus of the East-West Center’s Senior Journalists Seminar Fellowship and a 2022 World Press Institute fellow with the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. Mr. Ziabari has covered the United Nations on a Dag Hammarskjold Fund for Journalists fellowship.
The panel was convened and moderated by Dr. Claudia Yaghoobi, Roshan Distinguished Professor of Persian Studies and AIS President-elect.
This panel examined how universities in Iran have become sites of layered violence – bombings, sanctions, and internal repression – rather than protected spa...
