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.

A look at the Shah’s policies after the Mossadegh years shows anything but “fascism.”

Beginning in 1963, the Shah’s “White Revolution” granted women the right to vote and hold political office. His Family Protection Laws of 1967 and 1975 legalized divorce for women and raised the minimum marriage age to 18. Around the same time, the Shah’s Literacy Corps—encouraged by the Kennedy administration—expanded education as part of a broader modernization campaign.

In the late 1950s, more than 67 percent of Iranian men and over 80 percent of Iranian women were illiterate; by 1979, those rates had been nearly cut in half. Before the Shah’s land reforms, just one percent of the population owned 60 percent of Iran’s farmland. Under the monarchy, small property ownership expanded alongside industrialization. Secular courts also grew in prominence, alienating the clerics who would later seize power in 1979. In 1973, the Shah even nationalized Iran’s oil industry.

By left-wing metrics, these are hardly the actions of an imperialist puppet regime. Yet many young American intellectuals ignored them entirely, condemning the Shah not for what he did, but for what he represented: Iran’s alignment with Western civilization—and their own hostility toward it.

Like today, college campuses in the 1970s became battlegrounds over Iran’s future. Predictably, the pro-American and modernizing Shah was villainized by students and tepidly supported by college administrators. Activists from Iran’s pro-Communist Tudeh Party helped form the Confederation of Iranian Students (CIS) in Europe. In 1961, these activists, now abroad, held a “joint congress” in Paris with their American counterparts from the Iranian Students Association. A year later, this student coalition formed the Confederation of Iranian Students/National Union (CISNU) and adopted the motto “Unity-Struggle-Victory,” which animated the era’s anti-Western and anti-Shah activism. In retrospect, their activism seems eerily contemporary.

Members of the CISNU included Abolhassan Banisadr, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, and Mostafa Chamran, all of whom were later members of the post-1979 government of the Islamic Republic. Banisadr served as the first president of revolutionary Iran, and was regarded by Ayatollah Khomeini as the “link” between Western intellectuals and the theocracy’s own revolutionary movement. Ghotbzadeh was one of the Islamic Republic’s first foreign ministers. Chamran helped form the Muslim Student Association in the United States before graduating with a PhD in physics from UC Berkeley. Later, Chamran trained in Cuba and joined training camps run by the Palestine Liberation Organization. Following the 1979 Revolution, Chamran served as the new Islamic Republic’s defense minister. Campus radicals today tend to become dictators or terrorists tomorrow, and the Shah’s campus opposition did not disappoint. By the late 1970s, CISNU’s efforts to demonize the Shah were gaining traction among 100,000 Iranians studying abroad and among other radical student groups, who were animated by the Vietnam War and other revolutionary struggles in the Third World. Like what is all too often the case today, university administrators capitulated to student radicals. 

A speech by the Iranian poet Reza Baraheni at Columbia University in 1976 highlights how left-wing intelligentsia characterized the monarchy’s relationship with universities. Baraheni, a vocal critic of Shah, demonized Pahlavi as a “US-crowned cannibal” while criticizing his relationships with MIT, UCLA, and Harvard, and elsewhere. Baraheni called Pahlavi the “shah of UCLA and Harvard.” The Shah’s ties with American universities were indeed close, but not evil. 

In late 1974, Harvard University administrators traveled to Iran to meet with the Shah’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education to establish a new university in the country as part of the monarchy’s modernization efforts. After a $1.5 million gift from the Shah that year, Harvard and the monarchy met in 1976 to finalize a $425,000 contract with Iran to finalize planning a proposed Reza Shah Kabir research center. Antipathy toward the Shah at UCLA began in 1964, when the Organization of Arab Students staged a protest against his commencement address. UCLA’s Arab student group organized the protest against the Shah’s crackdown on supporters of the “Reverend” Ayatollah Khomeini. Ironically, for the Shah’s left-wing critics, his commencement address discussed reducing wealth gaps in Iran and the need to eradicate vestiges of Persian feudalism. UCLA granted Reza Pahlavi an honorary doctorate. Anti-Shah activism at Navarro College in Texas prompted the campus administration to restrict enrollment by foreign nationals. In reaction, Navarro experienced riots and arrests as a result. 

A 1978 Los Angeles Times article stated that student demonstrations were “commonplace.” When the 1979 Iranian Revolution broke out, and the American embassy was seized, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services interviewed 56,694 Iranian students for potential deportation; of those, 445 were removed. Not all Iranian students supported the revolutionaries; however, the fear of unrest and terrorism in the West was not unfounded. Iranian student organizations helped topple the Shah, and in retrospect, helped destabilize the Middle East for decades. One reason so few students were deported was the intervention of sympathetic campuses.

On Nov. 10, 1979, the Carter administration directed the Attorney General to initiate deportations for all Iranian students in the United States and ordered all Iranian student visa holders to report to immigration officers. Harvard’s administration worked with students facing financial setbacks due to the revolution so that they could continue their studies, just as Iranian students on multiple campuses faced suspicion, and sometimes threats, from their non-Persian classmates. At OSU, anti-Khomeini protesters faced off with pro-revolutionary students from the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade. A non-Iranian medical student at the University of Texas said, “I think American students have grown up with so much anti-Americanism, that they just about count on it … we are experts at it ourselves. We do feel sorry for the hostages and angry, but I think you have to be middle-aged to have moral outrage about it.” At UC Berkeley, students from the Committee Against Harboring Criminals burned an American flag and demanded that the Shah be deported back to Iran.

History may not repeat, but it often rhymes. Sometimes it rhymes in Farsi. Earlier this month, Emory University fired Fatemeh Ardeshir Larijani from her position as a professor of hematology and medical oncology. Fatemeh is the daughter of the Islamic Republic’s Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, sanctioned by the U.S. for orchestrating the regime’s violent crackdown on street protesters. Pro-democracy protesters demonstrating outside Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute, along with calls from members of Congress, helped initiate her dismissal. Meanwhile, Yale hosted Trita Parsi, the founder of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) and Vice-President of the Quincy Institute. Parsi has advocated for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Obama-era nuclear agreement that the Trump administration terminated. 

NIAC has lobbied for sanctions relief for Tehran. NIAC claims to represent Iranians as the “largest Iranian-American organization in the United States”; however, subsequent lawsuits against the group found that NIAC inflated these numbers and was found to receive financial backing from business organizations wanting sanctions relief for Tehran. NIAC worked to undermine support for Israel and reshape perceptions of theocracy in the U.S. NIAC supported protests against the Trump administration’s “Operation Midnight Hammer” that struck Iran’s nuclear sites last year. NIAC worked alongside the ANSWER Coalition, backed by pro-Beijing millionaire Neville Singham, to manufacture the protests. Other organizers included the Palestinian Youth Movement and the Democratic Socialists of America. This ideological mix is the same that opposed the Shah and hates the West in principle.

By many accounts, the days of the Islamic Republic are numbered. The Abraham Accords, a reinvigorated American foreign policy, and sustained internal demands for change in Iran signal that the end of the Ayatollah may be near. Who takes power in Iran after the end of the Islamic Republic remains to be seen. But judging by higher education’s past activism against the Shah—and its sympathy for Tehran today—a new pro-Western government would be no less hated than the old one.