Expelled professors, knowledge in exile
The Iranian university and the scholars left outside it
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
The history of the university in modern Iran could be written as a list of the people driven out of it. The Cultural Revolution of 1980 to 1983 closed the universities and 'purged' thousands of teachers and students. In the decades that followed new words appeared: the 'starred' student, the professor 'forcibly retired', the contract that was not renewed. After the protests of 2022 the names of a number of professors were once again removed from faculty lists. Each time the university lost something that no statistic records.
Knowledge, however, does not disappear when a scholar is expelled; it moves. Part of it goes to universities in Europe and North America, where it is written in another language for other readers. Another part takes refuge in private classes, study circles, podcasts and online lecture series. The Bahá'í Institute for Higher Education, formed in 1987 with volunteer teachers and classes held in private homes, is a clear example of a university built outside the university, because inside it there was no place for its students.
Edward Said calls exile an 'unhealable rift' between a human being and a native place. For an exiled scholar the rift runs both ways. In the host country they are often seen as an 'expert on Iran' rather than an expert in their own field. In their own country their writing either never reaches readers or is dangerous to read. The knowledge they produce hangs between two languages and two institutions, and is fully seen in neither.
My question is this: if the university is no longer the only home of knowledge, where should homeless knowledge be recorded, gain recognition and reach the next generation? An online lecture series with thousands of listeners today may vanish tomorrow when a channel is closed. A book published in exile may never find a place in a library in Iran. We need an infrastructure that takes the work, not the institution, as the basis of recognition; that keeps the author's name and the history of the work; and that works in Persian, not only about it.
The annual reports of the Scholars at Risk Network record a longer list of attacks on academic freedom every year, and Iran is always on it. But recording repression is not enough. What the repressed have built must also be recorded and kept within reach. That is a duty of the universities that host exiled scholars today.
Questions for discussion
- What responsibility do European universities hosting exiled scholars bear towards those scholars' language and original readers?
- Can underground and online teaching gain a standing equal to the university's, and who should recognise it?
- How can knowledge made outside institutions be preserved without putting its makers at risk?
References
Said, Edward W. 2000. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Harvard University Press.
Scholars at Risk Network. Free to Think: Report of the Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Monitoring Project. Annual reports.