Recently, campus security officers have assumed a more direct role in suppressing student demonstrations, particularly at the Amir Kabir University in Tehran (formerly known as Tehran Polytechnic University). The increasing involvement of campus security in suppressing student protests marks the beginning of a new era in confronting independent student movements.

Some of the new functions assumed by campus security officers include: preventing students from dispersing flyers and publications; engaging students in violent confrontations; disrupting peaceful student gatherings; organizing Basiji and plain-clothed vigilantes to confront students; spying on student activists; and threatening student activists with physical confrontations outside the university.

Such new measures closely resemble those taken by the infamous university guards during the time of the Shah’s rule. At that time too, campus security officers were enticed to take a more hands-on role in organizing pressure groups and para-military individuals who intimidated student activists by threatening them with arrest or a physical confrontation of some sort, inside or outside the university. In the meantime, campus security officers intentionally created a hostile environment inside the university, which gave these pressure groups a legal pretext for confronting student activists inside the university.

From a different perspective, the involvement of campus security in suppressing student activists points to the failure of the Ahmadinejad government in controlling the student movement and imposing the regime’s dominant ideological views inside these educational institutions. The administration’s previous efforts at suppressing independent student movements have failed, creating the need for more violent and physical confrontations to change the balance of power inside universities in favor of the administration.

Nevertheless, students will most likely overcome this new tactic through their use of civil methods of resistance and activism, showing to the police and security officers that freedom if speech and thought cannot be suppressed through force or violence.

If violent confrontations and campus security measures were effective in suppressing independent student movements, then the Shah’s regime would have succeeded in completely destroying these movements. A repeat of the methods used during eh cultural revolution may suppress voices of dissent in the university for a short while, but the country’s conditions right now do not allow the Islamic Republic’s leaders to take such measures. What is obvious is that, sooner or later, the new methods of confrontation will prove to be ineffective.