Ahmadinejad vows to purge varsities of ‘liberal influence’
TEHRAN, Sept 5: Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday vowed to cleanse schools and universities of liberal influence, continuing a drive to restore revolutionary values to the country.
“Our educational system has been influenced by secular thoughts for 150 years in a way that self-belief and identity have been ignored,” the student news agency ISNA quoted him as telling a gathering of elite students.
“There has been an effort to promote a secular system and thoughts in society. To change it is difficult. We have to do it together, but things have started.”
The fiercely ideological Ahmadinejad, currently at loggerheads with the West over Iran’s nuclear programme, has repeatedly vowed to restore to Iran the ideological purity of the days after the 1979 revolution.
“A student must yell against liberal thoughts and the liberal economy. A student must ask why a secular teacher gives low marks to a student that does not have the same ideas as him,” he said.
“I tell young people that changing the secular teaching regime that has dominated for 150 years is a difficult thing,” he said, in apparent reference to the establishment of Iran’s first western-style institution of higher education in 1851.
“We need to do it together. Measures have been taken before, but it is not sufficient,” he added.
In June, some 40 professors at Tehran university were forced into early retirement. The government said that the time had come for the long-serving academics to leave their posts.
The retirement led to several days of protests by students who took the loss of so many professors as a politically motivated purge of universities.
Mr Ahmadinejad has already acted on his election promise to restore revolutionary values to Iran, in December ordering Iran’s radio and television network not to play western music and instead use revolutionary-era tunes.
Iran has also launched a fresh crackdown against ‘decadent’ satellite television, raiding rooftops in Tehran and other major cities to seize hundreds of dishes.
However pre-election fears that the president, in power for more than a year, would launch a radical clampdown on social liberties have not been realised.
Since the 1979 revolution, universities have been the scene of political upheaval.
Under the general banner of the ‘Cultural Revolution’, the leaders of the revolution sought to impose hardline values on the universities and rid them of what they deemed secular and western influence.
The universities were closed for nearly two years while the administration and curriculae were changed, and many professors were dismissed, some accused of being loyal to the toppled Shah.
Mr Ahmadinejad also warned students about the perils of attending seminars abroad, which he said could be ‘tricks’ to steal the best of the country’s 2.3 million students.
“About foreign seminars, I believe they have to be attended but some
of these conferences are tricks to exploit young people and steal them. In these conferences they are seeking to spot elite brains and attract them.”—AFP
