The Tarbiat Modarres University has become a center of attention in recent months with the escalation of plans to ideologically cleanse its staff. The wave of purges began after the Supreme Leader attended a dinner event with university professors. Many of those who watched the dinner’s televised broadcast saw Farhad Rahbar, the appointed head of Tarbiat Modarres University, to be in charge of the event’s organization.

What angered the regime’s officials the most was the fact that Mohsen Kadivar, a prominent dissident cleric, was holding his own dinner event blocks away from the Supreme Leader’s ceremony; especially since Kadivar’s event attracted scores of prominent cultural and political personalities.

Following this event, first Saeed Hajjarian [the ideologue behind the reform movement] was purged from the University’s Political Science staff. Then Mohsen Kadivar was purged from the philosophy staff. And finally, Aghajari [another prominent dissident intellectual] was removed from his position as the head of the University’s History Department. Following the student and faculty protests to these ideological purges, the chancellor of Tarbiat Modarres University, Rahbar, appointed the head of the University’s women Basij to head the University’s Basij force with the aim of having him issue a statement in support of the recent purges.

This has been a recent trend as more hardline and radical elements are gradually replacing the moderate elements on the university’s academic board.

Meanwhile, the university’s philosophy group has not met for more than a month, and students are getting wary in the delays on the review and approval of their dissertations.

It has been reported that Mir Hossein Mousavi [Iran’s Prime Minister in the 1980s], who is a member of the University’s Board of Trustees, is planning to resign in protest to the ongoing trend. A number of the university’s professors, however, believe that Mr. Mousavi should stay and confront the wave of ideological purges.

Given the events of the past few months and the consolidation of the radicals’ position in Iran’s power structure, one can expect even more ideological purges at Iran’s centers of higher education.