The history of student struggles in Iran is almost as old as the country’s first university. From the first student protests and strikes in 1934 and 1935 to the present day, universities have witnessed a wide range of political and union struggles. At certain historical moments, their impact has extended far beyond the university itself. From protests against the Shah’s regime to protests against the Islamic Republic, the university has consistently stood as one of the main bastions of resistance. A full account of its historical trajectory, however, lies beyond the scope of this text. To understand the university today, it is nevertheless necessary to return at least to December 2017-January 2018 protests (Dey moment). This marked a new phase in the struggle against the Islamic Republic. It created a clear rupture with what had come before. Since the 1979 Revolution, these protests were unprecedented in their geographical scale. Qualitatively, they also signaled the emergence of a revolutionary political subject. This subject entered the streets to create a new form of political practice beyond official and electoral politics. For this reason, the Dey moment shaped all contemporary struggles, from women’s movements and the struggles of oppressed ethnic groups to labor and union mobilizations. It also laid the groundwork for the successive mass uprisings that followed in later years. The university was not untouched by these political tremors.
During the January 2018 protests, students gathered beneath the main gate of the University of Tehran, a symbolic space between the university and the street. There they chanted, “Reformists, conservatives, the game is over.” This slogan gave concrete expression to the central political meaning of the January uprising: the rejection of official politics and the binary opposition between reformists and conservatives. These were the same students who, several years earlier, had begun organizing against the concrete effects of neoliberal policies in higher education. Those policies had made student life increasingly difficult. Operating through what became known as the Students’ Union, they succeeded in attracting students who had become deeply disillusioned with the university representatives of both official political factions.
Through campaigns around students’ union demands, and by making use of the institutional space provided by the student union councils, these activists exposed the shared class politics underlying both the reformist and conservative camps. In doing so, they further undermined the legitimacy of student organizations affiliated with these two political currents. Yet it was the Dey moment that elevated their union struggles. Their demands acquired an explicitly political character. This transformation was reflected in slogans such as “Reformists, conservatives, the game is over” and “Bread, Work, Freedom.”
Immediately after these demonstrations, the authorities launched a large-scale crackdown. Many activists associated with the union movement, as well as students linked to them, were arrested. In the following months, several leading activists received long prison sentences. At the same time, a series of legal restrictions and regulatory changes concerning the establishment and operation of student union councils significantly weakened these institutions as organizational platforms for the movement. In this sense, the participation of the Student’s Union movement in the January 2018 protests represented both the peak of its political visibility and the beginning of its gradual decline.
Beyond the consequences of the security crackdown that plunged the students’ union movement into crisis, another crisis emerged. As the movement’s political dimension grew stronger than its union-oriented dimension, the previously accepted proposition that “the union [economic] struggle is political” became a subject of debate among some activists and sections of the student body. Different answers to this question led to internal divisions within the movement.
One response was to retreat from the political sphere and focus exclusively on students’ union demands. Those who adopted this position regarded the efforts of much of the union movement to build connections between the student movement and struggles outside the university as a deviation from its proper mission. Examples of these efforts can be found in 2018 and 2019. During the workers’ strikes at the Haft Tappeh Sugarcane Company and the Ahvaz Steel Complex, as well as the nationwide teachers’ strikes, students affiliated with the union movement organized solidarity rallies on university campuses. They chanted slogans such as “We are the children of workers; we will stand by them,” “Students, workers, teachers, unity,” and repeated the striking workers’ slogan, “Bread, Work, Freedom, Workers’ Councils.” In their statements, they also advocated the idea of council-based administration of the university. In another symbolic act of solidarity, during the 2019 Student Day protest at the University of Tehran, students held up one of the slogans associated with the French Yellow Vest Movement: “Iran, France, Iraq, Lebanon, Chile… The struggle is one: Down with neoliberalism.”
Later that same year, during the nationwide November 2019 uprising, which began with the increase in fuel prices and ended in a bloody crackdown, students at several universities organized demonstrations in support of the popular protests. Once again, the state’s response was repression. Many students were arrested, and prison sentences followed. In one striking incident, plainclothes security forces entered a university campus in an ambulance and arrested several protesters.
The events of November 2019 once again raised the question: “Is the union struggle political?” This time, however, some activists answered by withdrawing even from union struggles themselves. The seeds of this tendency had already appeared after the January 2018 protests, but they gradually became more visible within the universities. Faced with an expanding wave of social struggles, this tendency interpreted student union activism as a retreat from political reality. It dismissed such activity as a form of syndicalism that had become irrelevant under revolutionary conditions. Yet students’ union issues translated class oppression into an immediate and lived experience. It was precisely through the development of these union struggles that class struggle became possible within the university. Together with other forms of student activism against the despotic character of the Islamic Republic, they also created the possibility of building connections with struggles outside the university against other forms of oppression.
At the same time, the current within the student’s union movement that represented a class-oriented political perspective throughout the 2010s lacked the political organization and institutional structure necessary to withstand state repression and the internal disputes that followed. This weakness created a rupture between that generation and the next generation of student activists. Although there were moments when attempts were made to establish broader political connections beyond union activism, these efforts remained temporary and largely depended on individual initiatives. As a result, they failed to produce lasting organizational outcomes. In other words, the absence of a long-term political strategy within the university meant that nearly all of the movement’s energy was consumed by immediate struggles. Once that generation of student activists graduated, almost no trace of its political line or organizational legacy remained within the university.
Taken together, these developments accelerated the decline of the student’s union movement. The subsequent two-year suspension of in-person university education during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting loss of face-to-face contact with the student body, delivered what was effectively the final blow to the movement.
After universities reopened in April 2022, a largely new generation had entered higher education. Because of the two-year interruption caused by the pandemic, this generation had a much weaker material connection to the history described above. Despite the worsening of students’ welfare conditions, only a few isolated union protests emerged. Nevertheless, at the level of discourse, the tradition of earlier struggles remained alive.
Only a few months later, however, the killing of Jina (Mahsa) Amini and the protests that followed transformed the situation. Once again, the university erupted. For several months, it stood at the center of the uprising. Student demonstrations began in the very first days of the Jina Uprising. They were directly connected to the struggles unfolding in the streets and were political from the outset. As a result, student activism differed significantly from the previous period.
The unprecedented size of student gatherings produced more radical slogans against the Islamic Republic and more confrontational forms of action. Students physically resisted attacks by the Basij militia and university security forces. Female students burned their headscarves on campus. Students challenged gender-segregated spaces such as libraries and dining halls by occupying them together. They removed the partitions separating women and men in university cafeterias. They also transformed university courtyards and lobbies into mixed-gender dining spaces. These actions became common forms of resistance.
At the end of the first week of protests, the state’s response was a wave of mass arrests. Several universities were then shifted to online education for a number of weeks. Yet this decision unexpectedly broke the deadlock surrounding nationwide student strikes. Students across universities began organizing coordinated strikes, and gradually they also gained the support of some faculty members. At several universities, demonstrations continued alongside the strikes. In some cases, security forces even entered campuses from outside to suppress the protests.
The continuing arrests of students became another force sustaining the movement. Students continued to demonstrate while demanding the release of their imprisoned classmates. The scale of repression was unprecedented compared to earlier periods. During the first three months of the Jina Uprising alone, at least 600 students were arrested. Many of these arrests were intended to destroy social networks and make collective organizing impossible. In addition, around 10,000 students were summoned before university disciplinary committees. Approximately 3,500 of them received disciplinary sanctions. These included formal reprimands, suspension from one or more semesters, expulsion from university dormitories, and even permanent expulsion from their universities.
Beyond the question of repression, the forms of collective organizing that emerged during the uprising also differed markedly from the previous period. Earlier student activism had possessed a limited but real degree of organization. It was built through sustained union struggles and the institutional capacities provided by the students’ union councils. By contrast, the groups that organized and led protests during the Jina Uprising were formed primarily through friendship networks and informal circles. Throughout the uprising, they never developed into organized or structured political organizations.
To be sure, simply reconstructing the earlier forms of organizing—which had largely relied on open and public activity—would not have been effective under conditions of severe repression. Yet no viable clandestine alternative was developed either. These groups represented themselves only through statements signed “A Group of Students of [Name of University].” Even over time, they did not develop a more stable collective identity. For example, they never publicly announced themselves as organized groups while preserving the anonymity of their members. Nor did they formulate a long-term project or strategy for sustaining organized political activity within the university. As the uprising gradually subsided, these groups either dissolved completely or reverted to being nothing more than informal circles of friends.
Another distinctive feature of student protests during the Jina Uprising was a striking contradiction. During this period, the university became a site where both the most progressive and the most reactionary slogans were reproduced. For example, in response to attempts by monarchist groups to impose their agenda on the uprising, students repeatedly chanted slogans such as “Death to the oppressor, whether the Shah or the Supreme Leader,” and “Neither monarchy nor supreme leadership; democracy and equality.” In support of striking workers during the Jina Uprising, students also chanted slogans including “Our oil workers are our steadfast leaders,” “Students, workers—unity, strike,” and “Students and workers, we stand together on the front line.”
At the same time, alongside the widespread chant of “Woman, Life, Freedom,” the university also echoed with slogans containing sexist insults, homophobic language, and references to sexual violence. The reactionary addition “Man, Homeland, Prosperity,” introduced to neutralize the emancipatory potential of “Woman, Life, Freedom,” was repeated more frequently on university campuses than almost anywhere else.
These examples show that during the Jina Uprising the university simultaneously displayed both hopeful and deeply troubling political potentials. Despite the intensification of the commodification of higher education—which had significantly altered both the university’s class composition and the nature of its demands—a plurality of political voices continued to exist within the university. The important difference from the previous period, however, was that although these reactionary tendencies had already existed among some students, they had previously lacked the capacity for political mobilization because of the hegemonic position of the students’ union movement. During the Jina Uprising, by contrast, they too were able to assert themselves within the broader student protests.
After the Jina Uprising subsided, the aftershocks of repression continued for many months. New restrictive regulations targeting students were introduced. For example, during the following academic year universities adopted new rules aimed at punishing students who did not comply with the government’s mandatory dress code. In some cases, these students were partially prevented from entering university campuses. Female security officers were also deployed across campuses to enforce compulsory veiling regulations and confiscate student identification cards, thereby placing additional pressure on female students. These measures were met with scattered but limited acts of resistance.
The following year, as these forms of repression gradually eased and the number of disciplinary sanctions declined, class-based attacks on the university once again intensified. One of the clearest examples was the reduction by one semester of the maximum permitted period of study. At the same time, students’ welfare conditions—especially the poor quality and rising cost of dormitories and university food services—deteriorated so sharply that parts of the student body gradually returned to union-based demands and collective action.
As expected, however, changes in the university’s class composition also transformed the character of some union demands. Alongside entirely legitimate protests—such as the sustained demonstrations at around ten universities at the beginning of the current academic year against declining food quality and rising prices, which were the direct result of outsourcing and privatization, other protests revealed alarming social changes within the university itself.
A clear example occurred in February 2025, when a group of students at K. N. Toosi University of Technology protested because one of the university’s campuses was located in a working-class neighborhood. They claimed to feel unsafe and demanded that the police protect them from the surrounding community. They even organized a sit-in demanding secure parking facilities for their private cars.
This does not mean that the student body had become politically homogeneous. For example, only one year later, the same university witnessed one of the longest-running protests against the quality and cost of university food. During these demonstrations, students also raised slogans against the commodification of higher education. In this period, as during the Jina Uprising, both progressive and reactionary political potentials remained visible within the university, although with some shifts in their relative strength. Ultimately, however, during the latest waves of popular protests in December 2025 and January 2026, it was those groups that had developed organizational cohesion and political preparedness that proved capable of making effective use of the opportunities created by the protests.
The first student demonstration during the protests took place on the night of 29 December 2025 in the University of Tehran Dormitory. Students chanted, “Neither barracks nor enterprise, long live the university.” This slogan recalled the class-oriented tradition of the student movement in previous years. It expressed opposition both to the Islamic Republic’s securitization of the university and to the commodification of higher education as one of the government’s neoliberal policies. The slogan became the target of coordinated media attacks by pro-Pahlavi outlets during that period.
The character of this demonstration reflected and continued the logic of the protests that had begun two weeks earlier against the cancellation of dormitory accommodation for students who had exceeded the standard period of study and against the exorbitant cost of university food. In their statements, the protesting students spoke of resisting the machinery of a profit-driven system that produces the shared suffering experienced by students, workers, teachers, nurses, school pupils, women, and minorities. Yet these voices, which articulated a class-based relationship between the university and society, were quickly silenced.
During the demonstration of 30 December 2025 at the University of Tehran, most protesters, despite chanting “Death to the oppressor, whether the Shah or the Supreme Leader,” and expressing a clear anti-despotism orientation, also chanted “We hate dictatorship; we stand with the bazaar.” Whether consciously or not, this slogan completely erased the class content that had characterized earlier protests at the university.
In the days that followed, until the beginning of the second week of protests when universities were successively closed and moved online, demonstrations also took place at several other universities. The dominant slogans were negative slogans directed against the Islamic Republic. Pro-Pahlavi slogans, and even “Woman, Life, Freedom,” remained relatively marginal. At the same time, however, no serious political opposition to the Pahlavi current emerged within these demonstrations.
The student protests that took place after the fortieth day of mourning for those killed in the 8-9 January 2026 massacre, and after some universities reopened, until the outbreak of the war and the renewed closure of universities, had a noticeably different character from the earlier protests. The organized presence of the pro-Reza Pahlavi current had become an undeniable feature of the street protests during January 2026 protests. This created the conditions for its expansion into the university.
The pro-Pahlavi student constituency had learned from the experience of the “Pahlavi Organization” in the streets. This time, it sought to intervene in the university in a more organized manner. The appearance of the first openly pro-Pahlavi and anti-left slogans in March 2026 convinced its activists that the conditions were now suitable for expanding the Pahlavi Organization onto university campuses. They concluded that the time had come to establish the Lion and Sun Association.
The first such association was announced by a pro-Pahlavi student media outlet. Beginning the following day, Lion and Sun Associations were announced one after another in the name of different universities. To date, associations have declared their existence at approximately 70 universities. The timing and manner of their formation strongly suggest that they resulted from a centrally coordinated directive and a pre-existing organizational plan.
It is likely that some of these announcements were fabricated and that a number of these “associations” lacked any meaningful organizational presence. Nevertheless, at least in the majority of universities that joined the protests during that period, slogans associated with the Pahlavi current could be heard. Regardless of how widely these slogans were accepted among students, the important point is the organized and openly identifiable presence of the Pahlavi current on university campuses. This demonstrates that the student media arm of the Pahlavi Organization, unlike most of its opponents, did not confine itself to media activism. Instead, it sought to consolidate its networks around a specific political project and organize itself for effective intervention.
At the same time, other voices also emerged within the university. Beyond the purely negative slogans against the Islamic Republic, which could be adopted by almost any political current, a small number of students also openly opposed the Pahlavi current and articulated a different political horizon. Taking “Woman, Life, Freedom” as a common point of reference, some of these students attempted to build an alternative coalition. After publishing a joint statement signed by independent student activists from 26 universities, they announced the formation of a media coalition intended to serve as a coordinating and organizing body for students. They presented themselves as heirs to the university’s traditions of political and union struggles.
As shown above, one of the defining characteristics of the university’s political and union struggles in recent years has been their class content. These struggles consistently challenged the logic of profit and the imposition of class domination within the university. Politically, they combined opposition to despotism with solidarity toward workers, teachers, women, and other oppressed groups and their struggles. In contrast, however, the largely short-lived and media-oriented activities of this new coalition demonstrated that resistance to the existing class order was not among its principal concerns. Indeed, in the name of respecting political pluralism and maintaining unity against the Islamic Republic, the coalition even publicized the material and organizational activities of the Pahlavi current through its own media platforms.
At present, the dust of the war has not yet settled, and in-person education has still not fully returned to normal at Iranian universities. In the coming academic year, the student wing of the Pahlavi current, like other parts of that current—which had tied all its hopes for “victory” to foreign military intervention, will likely face challenges in redefining itself. Yet the sense of despair that led sections of the subaltern classes during the December 2025- January 2026 protests to chant the name of their own class enemy as their savior has not disappeared. On the contrary, it has deepened.
Those who celebrated the appearance of the Pahlavi name on university campuses as the “capture of the left’s last stronghold” will continue organizing and consolidating their supporters. If those forces within the university that still possess even a minimal capacity to confront this current once again refuse to take it seriously, or merely recycle the failed methods of the past, the disastrous outcomes described above will be repeated.
For this reason, failing to recognize these conditions with precision is an act of irresponsibility and negligence. If the university is to become a social institution that serves the interests of the subaltern classes, it is necessary to wage a disciplined and organized struggle simultaneously against the reactionary forces in power and the reactionary forces waiting to seize power. Such a struggle requires serious organizational cohesion in both revolutionary theory and revolutionary practice. It must be capable of developing a concrete program of action under a clearly defined political strategy. It must also situate itself, through organic links with struggles beyond the university, within a single, organized collective body.
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