AN AUGURY OF REVOLUTION: THE IRANIAN STUDENT ...

7,610 students. 39 James Bill acknowledged that “…an extremely significant part of the modern
education system is located outside of Iran.” 40
The increased number of Iranian students abroad
was not only a major development within the context of the Iranian educational system, but also
in Iranian political life and its foreign policy. As the shah noticed, the large numbers of Iranians
studying in the United States was “truly a remarkable phenomenon, although,…it had its
negative as well as positive aspects.” 41
In the shah’s eyes, one negative aspect was the politicization of the ISAUS that occurred
at the group’s eighth annual convention in Ypsilanti, Michigan in 1960. This was two years
before the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) formalized its beliefs in Port Huron,
Michigan. 42
While the ISAUS became organized politically before American student groups,
there was a transfusion of ideas between Iranian students and American protest movements
throughout the decade. Iranian students utilized the sit-in method contemporaneously with
members of the African American Civil Rights Movement. Their protests grew throughout the
middle of the decade, and Iranian students felt a level of solidarity with the Civil Rights
Movement, the anti-war movement, and the Free Speech Movement (FSM). By the end of the
decade they protested alongside members of SDS and the Black Panthers, along with various
European organizations. Members of Iranian student groups, like those in the United States and
Western Europe, developed more radical beliefs and alternative interpretations to Marxism-
Leninism as the decade progressed.
39 James Bill, The Politics of Iran: Groups, Classes, and Modernization (Columbus, Ohio: Merrill, 1972), 59.
40 Bill, The Politics of Iran, 58.
41 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Mission for my Country (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1961), 262.
To see the Shah’s complete discussion on Iranian education refer to pp. 238-65.
42 Tom Hayden wrote the Port Huron Statement on 15 June 1962. To read the statement and interpretations of it
refer to Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988), 84-102; Arthur Marwick, The Sixties:
Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958 - c.1974 (Oxford University Press,
1998), 53-4; Massimo Teodori, ed., The New Left: A Documentary History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969),
163-72.
13