Shabtabnews In this dark night, I have lost my way – Arise from a corner, oh you the star of guidance.
RFL/RE – Akbar Jafari, a professor at Tehran’s Sharif University, has resigned after being summoned and interrogated by security agents over his support for protests last year sparked by the September 2022 death of Mahsa Amini while in police custody.
Ali Sharifi Zarchi, a faculty member at Sharif University who was previously dismissed for backing student demonstrators, confirmed the expulsion, noting that Jafari had been the youngest full professor of physics at Sharif University, an expert in quantum materials, and a board member of the Iranian Physics Society.
Iran has been clamping down on any sign of dissent with arrests, intrusive and high-tech surveillance, and the dismantling of student organizations and purging of professors.
Universities and students have long been at the forefront of the struggle for greater social and political freedoms in Iran.
In 1999, students protested the closure of a reformist daily, prompting a brutal raid on the dorms of Tehran University that left one student dead. Amini’s death while being detained for an alleged head-scarf violation in September 2022 has once again made campuses a hotbed of dissent.
Over the years, the authorities have arrested student activists and leaders, sentencing them to prison and banning them from studying.
Zarchi, a faculty member at the computer-engineering department of Tehran’s Sharif University, was dismissed from the university in August.
During the recent nationwide protests, he repeatedly supported the students and at one point declared that he would suspend his classes until all detained students from Sharif University were released.
The activist HRANA news agency says at least 700 university students have been arrested during the recent unrest.
Many have faced sentences such as imprisonment, flogging, and dozens of students have been expelled from universities or suspended from their studies, as security forces try to stifle widespread dissent.
