Ask the Expert: Iranian Student Movements

Kenneth Pollack, the man who advised Presidents Clinton and Bush on the Gulf, gives you the lowdown about activism on Iran’s campuses.

What’s going on with student movements in Iran? How much power do they have to change things?—Michelle Paladino, NYU

Iranian students have been an important political force since the 1970s. In fact, high school and university students were a major element of the street demonstrations that helped bring down the Shah in 1978. Moreover, it was a group of Islamic fundamentalist university students who—on their own—took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979, setting off the 444-day hostage crisis between Iran and America.

Today, Iranian students remain deeply engaged in politics, and there are a lot of them. Given that roughly 70 percent of Iran’s population is under the age of 30, and that the voting age in Iranian elections has at times been set as low as 15, Iran’s students have the potential to be quite influential.

During the 1990s, the majority of Iranian students lost their enthusiasm for the theocratic regime that emerged from the 1978 revolution. The ruling clerics had done a terrible job managing Iran’s economy, resulting in large numbers of students emerging from school with no job prospects. Today, roughly 1 million new people enter the job market every year (most of them young people fresh out of high school or college), but the Iranian economy can generate only about 400,000 jobs per year. Especially for university students who believe that they are the cream of Iran’s crop and deserve a decent job, this has been a source of tremendous anxiety and frustration.

On top of this, Iran’s students had grown increasingly unhappy with the rigid social codes established by the fundamentalists who run the government. Some of the laws that particularly aggravated students included things like women having to cover their entire bodies in shapeless cloaks or coats, men and women not being allowed to hold hands in public (let alone kiss), and women being disallowed from riding bicycles because Iran’s Supreme Leader believed that this might excite men.

Consequently, in the mid-1990s, students became a key element in a broad movement across the Iranian population to try to reform the government. In 1997, this movement focused on a little known candidate for President, Muhammad Khatami, who promised an easing of social codes, an opening up of Iranian society to the rest of the world, and an effort to use these better ties with the rest of the world to address Iran’s economic problems. Huge numbers of students voted for Khatami, who won a stunning landslide victory over the regime’s preferred candidate.

For several years, Khatami’s reformist coalition fought a political struggle with the regime’s conservative leadership and the students often led the way. Angered by this student activism, some of the regime’s thugs attacked one of the dormitories at Tehran University ( Iran’s leading university) in the summer of 1999, killing a number of students there. In response, thousands of students from Tehran University and other schools in the capital took to the streets to protest against the regime.

This was the moment of crisis for the regime; the students called on President Khatami to push for greater reforms, which could have been the start of a second revolution. Meanwhile, the regime brought in divisions of the loyal Revolutionary Guard to crush the protests if it snowballed into a revolution. At the climactic moment, President Khatami backed down and condemned the students (allowing Supreme Leader Khamene’i to praise them, in a moment of incredible hypocrisy.) After that, the Iranian police moved in and violently dispersed the crowds of students.

From that moment on, Supreme Leader Khamene’i and the other conservatives began a program of legal and illegal activities that effectively stripped Khatami of all his powers and left the students angry and without a champion. In addition, the regime’s security services kept a close watch on student groups and whenever one of them began to demonstrate real leadership skills, he or she was immediately thrown in prison on trumped up charges, preventing the emergence of young leaders who could harness the political strength of Iran’s vast youth movement.

However, the student protests were not entirely in vain. The regime was so shocked by Khatami’s landslide victory (and a number of other massive electoral wins by other reformists in the years that followed) that while they cracked down hard on Khatami, reformists and student political groups, the conservatives also decided to loosen up on a number of social codes to try to placate young Iranians. The mixed result of this has been that, today, young Iranian women are wearing more daring clothing, the authorities tend to look the other way at loud parties or couples holding hands in public, and problems with drug addiction and abortions have skyrocketed in many Iranian cities. All of this is part of a deliberate campaign by the regime to try to divert the energies and frustrations of Iran’s younger generation away from politics and towards, well, hedonism.

Today, Iran’s student movement remains largely fragmented, frustrated, and leaderless. There is widespread disillusionment with Khatami and the other reformists, but no clear alternative to them. Iran will hold presidential elections in June and most Iranians (and outside experts) expect the conservatives to hand-pick Khatami’s successor from their own ranks and then prevent any opposition figures from running. As a result, some students have advocated backing “pragmatic” members of the regime like former President Hashemi Rafsanjani as the least bad of a range of rotten alternatives. Other students talk about a much longer term struggle, and even of starting an insurgency against the regime. Still others seem to have given up all hope of political reform and are concentrating on their studies or on their partying—which is basically what the regime wants.

Over the past eight years, Iranian students have won some hard-fought battles and even today Iran has greater freedom of speech, freedom of the press, political debate, and other forms of pluralism than many other Muslim Middle Eastern states. But there is little sense that the students can make additional major changes in the system any time soon. The best that many can do is to wait patiently, and hope for another opportunity like the one they had in 1997 when Khatami was first elected.

Kenneth M. Pollack is director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He served as a White House advisor on Persian Gulf Affairs during both the Clinton and Bush administrations. His most recent book is The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America (Random House: 2004).