Iran’s Universities Among Least Trusted
Tehran’s academic policies have received widespread criticism after Iran was announced to be among the countries with the highest rate of retracted scientific papers.
Tehran’s academic policies have received widespread criticism after Iran was announced to be among the countries with the highest rate of retracted scientific papers.
In a report published earlier in the month by Nature, considered by many as the world’s leading journal of science, Iran ranked seventh in the list of the countries with the highest retraction rates with an average of 16.7 retractions per 10,000 papers.
Only Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia, China, Egypt and Malaysia had a higher retraction rate in comparison with Iran, the report said.
Nature’s report analyzes the academic productions of the countries with 100,000 papers published over the past two decades.
Published papers get retracted when it is discovered that they violate ethical and professional guidelines due to scientific misconduct or plagiarism.
In June, Iran’s parliament announced that as many as half of the postgraduate theses produced between 2019 and 2022 have been fraudulently written.
Nature’s report drew the attention of university professors and researchers in Iran who have long been critical of the establishment’s over-emphasis on publishing papers in national and international journals.
Iran International interviewed several university professors and researchers in Iran about the worsening condition of conducting research projects in the country. They spoke on condition of anonymity fearing the Islamic Republic’s crackdown on critics.
An assistant professor at the University of Mazandaran told Iran International that the field of research in Iran has turned into a very lucrative market where “products” can easily be bought and sold.
Unofficial advertisements about the sale of research papers, theses, dissertations and semester projects can be found in university campuses, she said, adding that over recent years, offices have been founded in Tehran and many other cities that offer to write research papers for students and teachers at an exorbitant price.
She blamed the political ambitions of the Islamic Republic for the creation of such a notorious “research market,” noting that Tehran officials have time and again stressed that Iran should rank first in the region in terms of academic productions.
As a result, the research “obligations” for university teachers, postgraduate students and researchers have been devised by the government’s officials in a conscious attempt to “force” academicians to write as many papers as possible regardless of their quality or their industrial and practical utility, she went on to say.
One university professor told Khabar Online in Tehran that Iranian research has failed to solve pressing problems facing the country. “What is the purpose of these featureless articles, which are occasionally accused of being counterfeit and also jeopardize the country's international scientific reputation," the professor said.
A PhD holder in French literature from the University of Tabriz, one of Iran’s leading academic institutions, told Iran International that the pressure on teachers and students in Iranian universities to write a large bulk of research papers in fact reflects the authoritarian structure of the political establishment where quantity precedes quality.
If a PhD student does not reach the research quotas they will not be allowed to defend their dissertation, the researcher said, adding that the pressure starts with the Ministry of Science, university professors having no other way but to follow the ministry’s guidelines in order to keep their teaching positions.
According to a PhD student of TEFL at the University of Beheshti, many postgraduate students in Iran have no “research agenda” for themselves as is the case with the world’s top universities.
We are expected to work like “paper-manufacturing machines” so that our supervisors can get promoted, she said. De-motivated and under pressure, there are many students who resort to plagiarism or assign somebody else to complete their research projects, she went on to say.
Research published last year in the Journal of Academic Ethics, concluded that "Iran lags behind other countries with regards to what is known about contract cheating and how to address it", citing major reform needed in policy and academia.
However, this was not the first step in this process. For the first time in the Islamic Republic, a "pre-registration" stage was introduced, instructing potential candidates to submit their required documents on the Ministry of Interior's website.
More opportunities to disqualify
The introduction of this pre-registration stage, which occurred several months before the official registration, aimed to provide more opportunities for the interior and intelligence ministries, and the Guardian Council to scrutinize applicants' files, align them with the standards of provincial monitoring boards, and expedite the review process. The Ministry of Interior and the Guardian Council, now working in close coordination, feared that individuals who had previously passed their filters might later be disqualified if their online activities, such as "inappropriate" tweets or photos, did not meet the standards of the provincial monitoring boards in terms of lifestyle and obedience to the core of the regime. This allowed the government to disqualify candidates in two stages, avoiding the sudden disqualification of tens of thousands of individuals all at once.
Absolute Obedience
The main condition for passing these various sieves was not political independence or a criminal background, but rather absolute obedience. This condition has been explicitly emphasized by hardliner regime insiders: "Absolute guardianship [rule by Supreme Leader] is not enough; absolute obedience must also be next... The condition for people to participate in the battle is absolute obedience. Obedience is important, and the first principle of stability is absolute obedience to the Guardian Jurist,” a firebrand cleric Morteza Aqa-Tehrani said.
New Totalitarian Parties: Sharyaan And Azma
The 11th Majles elections in 2020 was the end of the presence Reformists’ and the moderates in the parliament. Hardliner allies of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei blocked most of them from getting elected to parliament, using the Guardian Council’s candidate vetting scheme. The new generation of the totalitarian hardliner faction, embodied in Paydari (endurance) party, paved their way to power by dominating the 12th parliament. They have launched two new parties recently: Sharyaan and Azma.
The members of Sharyaan (Persian acronym for the strategic network of supporters of the Islamic revolution) are mainly the high-ranking managers of the Raisi administration whose goal is to curtail the political influence of the Paydari Party and "Shana" (the Revolutionary Forces Coalition Council), which works under the general supervision of Haddad Adel, a close ally of Ali Khamenei. In the statement of this group, there are no policy recommendations and program for the country. They have announced their intention only to create a network for streamlining and gaining government positions. The key person of this group is Hamid Rasa`ee, who has a serious conflict with Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament, in terms of filling posts with their cronies.
Hossein Allah Karam, a member of Hezbollah, has also launched a party called Azma to participate in the upcoming elections. His party’s agenda is to enforce Khamenei’s orders.
The members of these groups are mainly recycled from the Ahmadinejad administration, and ex-members of the Khamenei’s office who want to be promoted to higher positions. By closing the road for the previous insiders, the Guardian Council has opened the way for them to run.
Purification
In domestic politics, repression even against regime insiders has escalated. This policy of eliminating people with any sign of disobedience has been called “purification”. It targets insiders who are not 100 percent loyal to Ali Khamenei. "Today we have reached the stage of purifying the revolution and we will definitely win", Mehdi Ta`eb, the commander of Ammar group and brother of Hossein Ta`eb, the former head of IRGC intelligence, said during the 2021 presidential elections. The Guardian Council is following this direction. By acting to stamp out “the impurity” of a part of the government, the ruling class is getting smaller.
Future implications
The result of this type of election engineering has been the entry of incompetent and corrupt people into the Majles and the abandonment of its core mission. In the 11th Majles, checks and balances were forgotten, and the legislature was not even able to draft laws, approving most executive branch bills without expertise. Dozens of investigation plans were initiated in the parliament, but due to lack of follow-up and orders from Khamenei’s office, the IRGC, and the executive branch, they were abandoned. Beyond that, the Majles has had no input in the most important affairs of the country, including a 50-percent inflation rate, astonishing government corruption, regional tensions made worse by the IRGC, and unprecedented emigration of skilled professionals.
Here are some of the scandals of the 11th Majles: manipulation of the budget figures by the Speaker after the approval of the budget in 2021; rejection of the credentials of the reformists after being elected; bribing members of the Tehran Municipality to shelve investigations; humiliation of the Speaker of the Majles by the Russian government, and reneging on the promise for transparent voting. Now these same politicians are aiming to control the fate of the 12th Majles.
The IRI 12th Majles will be another slough house where washed-up Basij and IRGC members go to spend what is left of their failed careers.
As the 8-year-long Iran-Iraq war ended in the late 1980s, some of the veterans who returned home, realized that the country has changed while they were in the battlefronts. Their generals got financial concessions from the government, and the cities looked as if there had never been a war, with women defying the compulsory hijab and male and female students mingling at the campuses and elsewhere.
Furthermore, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s death almost a year after the war made the situation look even worse for the veterans. Saddam Hussain, the Islamic Republic's arch enemy was now being referred to as Brother Saddam and an ally.
So, the former soldiers organized themselves as Ansar Hezbollah and started to attack the relatively moderate government of President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Having been indoctrinated during the war with Islamist propaganda, they beat women and university students in the streets of Tehran, Esfahan, Mashhad, and other major Iranian cities.
When the new leader, Ali Khamenei came to power, he used the Ansar on a few occasions to suppress dissent in Tehran and Mashhad, but generally, he did not give them much of a space to be politically active. Hossein Allahkaram, the vigilante group's leader was not happy with the spoils of war he had won, which was the much-sought license for a travel agency that could make anyone rich almost overnight. He wanted to have a say in politics, but everyone looked at the vigilante group as a bunch of reckless thugs.
Allahkaram, cleared the streets and went to the university using the government entitlement given to former soldiers. After his graduation, according to Etemad newspaper, he was no longer a man to stand in the streets. Now he wanted to sit at the political bureau of a political party. That was how he officially established The Society of Combatants Defending the Islamic Revolution, aka known as Razma.
The party's platform is one of "eliminating poverty, offering political and cultural insight, explaining the merits of the revolution, preparing cadres for the country, and nominating revolutionary candidates for elections." This, he said, "Is an independent party."
Coming from the lower depths of the Iranian society, and the poor neighborhoods of southern Tehran, Allahkaram, now 67, still travels on a motorbike and lives near a cemetery in southern Tehran. His violent past is almost forgotten, and he can now invest in his credentials as someone from the poor neighborhoods. Until late 1990s, he organized rallies in the affluent northern part of Tehran against capitalism and "hijablessness" and heavy-handedly tackled any barrier to the rallies. The price he paid, was the ban on his group's publications, otherwise he and his group passed the test of time almost without any serious consequence.
The government turned a blind eye on his activities as hardliners benefitted from his street battles with "liberals". However, Allahkaram never assumed any responsibility for the violence his group employed in the streets. His political track record includes his support for government agents murdering Iranian intellectuals in the 1990s and his mild criticism of Iranian thugs who attacked the British embassy in 2011.
Allahkaram may not be in a good position to compete with Iranian hardliners who are now at the center of Iranian politics, and he may not win as many seats in the parliament as he hopes. Other hardliners have turned into dragons and monsters, while Allahkaram and his group fought in Iraq, Bosnia and on the streets.