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Twenty years after the end of the Iran-Iraq War, members of the Basij [voluntary militia charged ‎with defending the Islamic Revolution] continue to receive benefits and quotas once allocated to ‎veterans who had fought in the war. Re-branded as "quotas for active Basijis," university ‎enrollment quotas allocated for members of the Basij have so far allowed 200 thousand Basijis to ‎enter the Azad University system. Additional government employment benefits have also been ‎set aside in recent years to members of the Basij. According to the country's police chief, more ‎than 80 percent of the police force's new hires are from the Basij.‎

Ever since the coming to power of the Ahmadinejad Administration, whom many affiliate with ‎the Revolutionary Guards, efforts to increase Basiji enrollment in universities have intensified. ‎Under a new quota system, branded as "quotas for active Basijis," members of the Basij who ‎were born after the Iran-Iraq War are eligible for university enrollment. ‎

The increasing enrollment of Basiji students complements the mass firing or retirement of ‎independent university professors in the past two years. ‎

Last summer, 1000 Basiji professors attended a conference hosted by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ‎and received orders from the President to prepare the fifth development plan. In that conference, ‎Ahmadinejad stated, "our responsibility today is to investigate untrue and expired ideas and, ‎based on Islamic foundations, design and propagate a superior model for human life." ‎

Following the conference, government officials announced repeatedly that they do not accept the ‎fourth development plan because of the role played by secular university professors in preparing ‎that plan. In an interview with hardliner Ghods daily, Jafar Yaghoubi, the head of the Basiji ‎Professors Organization and member of faculty at Emam Hossein University, announced that ‎Basiji professors now compose 25 percent of all professors. ‎

In a statement published earlier this year, the student wing of the reformist Mojahedin-e ‎Enghelab organization criticized the increasing discrimination in university enrollment ‎procedures: "the current condition of the nation's universities, especially after the establishment ‎of the ninth administration and the project to consolidate power, is critical and unsatisfactory." ‎

Citing the "increase in the scope of firing and retiring expert and independent professors, ‎suspension and firing of dissident students… and daily imprisonment of student activists," the ‎statement condemns "the injection of insiders, using illegal tactics, into university academic ‎boards, and serious planning to create a fabricated student body with proposals such as allocating ‎a 40 percent enrollment quota for Basiji students." ‎

‎"Expansive activities by university security to impose pressure on students and professors," ‎‎"serious and repeated attempts to dissolve student institutions," and "gender discrimination ‎against female students" are among other worries listed by the statements, all leading to one ‎common outcome: "the destruction of the university's minimal independence." ‎