On Iran’s Student Day, 16 Azar, universities confront securitization, marketization and banalization while searching for ways to revive a broken, generationally fragmented movement.
Every year on 16 Azar (7 December), Iran marks Student Day, commemorating three Tehran University students shot dead by security forces in 1953 during protests against the post-coup Shah regime while Richard Nixon was visiting Iran. Since then, 16 Azar has become a symbolic date for student resistance, linking campuses to wider struggles for democracy and justice in Iran.
Three Intertwined Crises on Campus
This 16 Azar (Student Day), I return once more to the university and the student movement — but not only to revisit memories of the past. I want to grasp the current situation and try to answer a difficult question: in what condition does the student movement find itself today?
Today, three simultaneous processes have brought the university to a very particular point: maximal securitization, deep commodification of education, and the banalization of the university. Although throughout these 46 years, and even before that, the student movement has always been a potential enemy of dictatorship, after the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising the university is no longer seen by the authorities as an academic space, but as a “potential centre of revolt”. This new regime rests on three intertwined processes: securitization, commodification, and banalization.
The heavy presence of security agencies, summonses, fabricated cases, threats against families, surveillance of students’ online spaces, and pressure on student associations and unions have turned the campus from a university space into a field of permanent control and monitoring. Digital cameras have pushed the old, traditional forms of surveillance into a new phase. Online monitoring of students — from private pages to shared student groups — has intensified the security atmosphere. University security offices (herasat), which were always auxiliary arms of the intelligence services, have since the Jina uprising explicitly come under the supervision and decision-making of IRGC Intelligence in recruitment and vetting, effectively upgraded to branches of the security apparatus inside the universities.
On the other hand, the commodification of education has turned the university from a “public right” into a “class privilege”. Heavy tuition fees, paid dormitories, compulsory student work just to secure a minimum livelihood, and the elimination of participatory mechanisms for students in educational decision-making all turn the student into a “tired customer” who only has to pass credits and stay afloat, instead of fostering students as aware and critical subjects. In the absence of basic welfare provisions such as food and dormitories, students themselves must shoulder the primary costs of food and housing at a time when Iran is sinking into an economic crisis.
The process of emptying the university of political and protest meanings has been underway for years. For a long time the state has treated depoliticizing the university as a deliberate project. In recent years this has reached its peak with invitations to groups such as “Fitileh-iha”, children’s entertainers from state television. The university space, instead of being a site for serious debate and discussion, has been reduced to a stage for child-oriented performances at the banal level of Fitileh-style shows.
Generational Cycles of Repression
These three processes together produce a dangerous mixture: a student who has neither the material time and energy to resist, nor the freedom and security to voice dissent, and who does not spend their days in an environment where any trace of idealism can be found. It is this situation that many of today’s activists describe with words such as “lethargy”, “stagnation” or “dead end”.
But if we look back, we see that deadlock is nothing new for the student movement. Whether in the years after the 1953 coup, or after the “Cultural Revolution”, or in more recent decades, universities as vanguard spaces and students as protesting citizens have always been targets of dictators’ repression.
One generation experienced deadlock after 9 July 1999, when the bloody repression of the Tehran University dormitory, disciplinary and security rulings, and the silencing of student organizations spread a sense of defeat and silence across campuses. Another generation felt the dead end in the 2000s, with even greater intensity after 2009: waves of arrests, heavy sentences, the “starring” of students’ files and the forced migration of many activists plunged the universities into a long shock.
Another generation lived through this bitter experience after the bloody November 2019, and today’s generation is living in the dead end after 2022; while the universities marched alongside the streets for months, they now face a combination of physical repression, digital control and psychological exhaustion. After each cycle of repression, students experience a generational gap. When a young person enters university, because of expulsions, suspensions and repression, they find no living link to the student movement; it takes years before a new generation can once again learn the methods of student protest. Students who enter campuses stripped of associations and protest experience conditions radically different from those who, from their very first days at university, were confronted with the political celebrations that marked the beginning of the academic year — an atmosphere that invited students to action and treated activism as an integral part of student life.
Amid these different dead ends there are clear similarities. In all these periods, the state has tried to control the university with tools such as arrests and shootings on campus, the “Cultural Revolution”, expulsions and suspensions, blacklisting students with “stars”, restricting associations, shutting down publications, and turning every collective action into a “security case”. But today’s impasse has some serious differences. There is an unprecedented economic and livelihood pressure that drains students’ time and energy and effectively turns them into mere consumers of knowledge who must finish their degree as fast as possible. At the same time, the commodification of knowledge has handed the university space over to the upper and upper-middle classes, who in many ways do not represent the political demands of society as a whole. Digital surveillance and online repression have turned even a Telegram group or an Instagram page into a potential “crime scene”; and after years of protest, executions and migration, psychological burnout and widespread despair have led many to ask: “Does any of this even matter?”
Every student activist and political actor tends to see their own period of activity as the hardest in history — I used to think so too. And yet the experience of different generations shows that the student movement has repeatedly come back to life out of just such dead ends. What has made this renewal possible?
Conditions for Renewal
First, there has always been some concrete, shared issue: a rise in tuition fees, an unfair expulsion or conviction of a student, the closure of a publication, the imposition of a repressive bylaw, or a national event such as 1999, 2009, 2017, 2019 or 2022. Whenever students feel that a “shared injustice” is taking place, the possibility of collective action reappears.
Second, none of these revivals has started from “nothing”; there have always been small but persistent cores: a few people who have had the patience to read, to write, to publish a bulletin, to organize a discussion circle, and who, despite defeats and repression, have not completely left the field. The big waves have been built on the shoulders of these small nuclei.
Third, whenever the movement has been strong, it has managed to connect the “corporate” or campus-based issues with the political ones. That is, it has cared about tuition fees, dormitories, quality of teaching, students’ future employment and livelihood, while at the same time not distancing itself from the struggle for freedom, democracy and human rights. Whenever these two have been separated, the movement has either been reduced to a harmless, purely corporatist body, or to a purely political current cut off from everyday life that loses its social base.
Fourth, wherever links between generations have been maintained, the movement has been able to rebuild itself more quickly. Today’s generational rupture is one of the main obstacles. Many activists of previous generations have emigrated; others have been silenced under security pressures; and the stable associations and publications that naturally served as channels of transmission have been weakened or shut down. As a result, the new generation often has to start from zero, repeat the same mistakes, and pay the price for things that had already been tested and learned.
If 16 Azar is still to mean anything, perhaps it is worth remembering these points: that even in the hardest dead ends, the university can once again become a subject of history — on condition that experiences are not forgotten, links are not left severed, and hope is not reduced to an empty slogan, but takes shape in small, insistent steps.
