A Few Words on the New Wave of University-Faculty Dismissals
Aydin Areta

Freedom is always the freedom of the person who thinks differently, and the guarantee of that person’s right to tell those in politics what they do not wish to hear.

All the ignorance, narrow-mindedness and vulgarity represented by Iran’s present political establishment are part of our collective and historical shadow, gradually entering our historical consciousness so that we may remember never to repeat this dark history.

From Chomsky and Howard Zinn to Tariq Ali and Cornel West, universities and the academic and cultural sphere in the West have always contained thinkers who openly and fiercely opposed Western policies.

For all the criticisms that can be made of the Western world, the statement attributed here to Benjamin Franklin, one of the intellectual architects of American independence, sits at the heart of the political approach to universities: without freedom of thought, it is impossible for anything called “wisdom” to emerge within a society.

Through a scheme called Connect, they want to bring back to Iran more than one hundred thousand Iranian students who have migrated, while remaining unable to think about the reasons why more than six million Iranians are described here as having left Iran over the past forty years.

No government succeeds by building walls between its own people. A nation can succeed only through its united and mutually understanding whole. In today’s interconnected world, migration is not necessarily negative and can even serve as a bridge between the world and contemporary Iran. Migration itself does not build a wall between migrants and their homeland if you have not already built such a wall for them inside the country.

John Stuart Mill once wrote, in the rendering given here:
A government that tries to crush the independent individuality of its people so that they resemble only the wishes of the government will quickly learn from history that no greatness can be achieved through crushed individuality and a fragmented society.