In the contemporary history of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the university has served far more than an auxiliary role to the state. It has functioned as the central pillar of modern national identity and the primary engine for what bibliometricians call ‘knowledge impact’ (Attarzadeh & Seyfidi, 2022). Prior to the COVID-19 Pandemic, Iranian academia had attained a global standing far better than that of most developing nations. The Iranian university system, once viewed as a strategic citadel—a means of projecting soft power while simultaneously securing the hard technical requirements of self-sufficiency—has changed drastically.
Did it falter?
For the last four decades, Iran has been navigating political upheavals, violence, and fractious currents of international isolation. The local protests and then the conflict with the U.S. and Israel has seen a near-total internet blackout in January and again this month by the government in Tehran, casting doubts on whether Iranian universities can continue to operate. These disruptions are the most severe to hit the academic sector since the 1980 “cultural revolution,” which resulted in a three-year total closure of universities. Sustained digital disenfranchisement exerts immediate and systemic pressure on the schooling and higher education sectors. It affects each sector of the economy and each element of society; this essay focuses on higher education and scientific research.
What does a continued internet blackout do to the higher education system? It halts online teaching and cuts access to scholarly literature, data, and research software, freezing academic output. This digital isolation bars participation in peer review and international collaborations. Students and faculty are pushed out of the global academic community, unable to manage applications, fellowships, visas, or submit research to international journals and conferences (Erfani 2026). From the 1996 peak in international collaboration to recent militarisation and conflicts, the university system has changed significantly.
Two main pressures shaped this: external ‘academic boycott’ due to sanctions, and internal ‘ideological purification’ by the state.
Iran faces an unprecedented existential crisis. Currently, the conflict has no end in sight. Military wars and armed aggression may have different impacts on the parties involved; the adverse effects on scientific advancement, scholarly engagement, and the sustenance of academia are irreversible. This weakens the bedrock that is meant to preserve human values and progress.
The ongoing crisis in and around Iran is not merely a matter of destroyed laboratories or vacant classrooms. It is the collapse of a legal and social contract that once positioned the university as the engine of national development. While geopolitical headlines focus on the kinetic aspects of regional warfare, a more profound destruction has occurred in the corridors of Iran’s universities and research institutions. The loss of key academic figures—through unceasing brain drain, as direct casualties, and through the intensifying “cleansing for political expediency” (Mosheim, 2026) marks the culmination of a slow and unfortunate decline.
The Pre-Sanction Era of Growth and Integration
Prior to the tightening of international sanctions in 2006 and the deep political fissures that followed the 2009 presidential election, Iranian higher education operated under a mandate of rapid expansion and modernisation. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the legal framework for education was defined by a five-year development plan, which sought to transition Iran into a knowledge-based economy. This growth was driven by a state-centric utilitarianism designed to modernise the workforce, yet it produced a significant socio-cultural tension. The state’s drive was often hyper-religious and mostly pharisaical. It was geared toward industrial needs, without accounting for shifting demographic realities.
STEM fields became the top national priority. Iran’s education spending was often higher than that of other countries in the region (Kokabisaghi et al. 2019). The government saw science as a source of international prestige beyond ideology. Universities acted as bridges for Iranian thinkers to connect with Western researchers. This was before politics became completely radicalised. The period pushed for ‘scientific meritocracy.’ Government departments had some technocratic freedom, and the university helped middle-class mobility. A favourable socio-legal climate enabled Iranian scholars to attend international conferences, fostering openness. Despite the Islamic Republic’s ideology, academics focused on rigour rather than politics (Habibi 2015; Beidollahkhani 2025). The early expansion of the Iranian university system was a paradox of state-driven utilitarianism and what seemed to be a genuine global ambition.
While the growth was engineered by the state to serve its own ends, the system enabled a level of international scientific exchange that, in retrospect, appears to be a lost era of integration. This period proved that Iranian intellectual talent was capable of global leadership when the doors of collaboration remained even partially ajar. The chart below has a non-exhaustive list of academic and research partnerships between universities in Iran and nations other than Russia and China. The current tragedy is not just the loss of funding, but the loss of that integrationist spirit. This foundation was severely tested as the geopolitical climate soured and international economic sanctions were imposed.
A Stanford University project called Stanford Iran 2040 Project provides a useful study (Azadi et al. 2020), employing a longitudinal analysis of Iran’s scientific trajectory and drawing on extensive datasets. In summary it reveals that Iran’s annual publication output increased from approximately 1,000 in 1997 to over 50,000 in 2018. Consequently, Iran’s proportional contribution to global scientific literature rose from 0.1% to 2.6% during this period. The disciplinary distribution of this output is characterised by a predominance in the fundamental sciences (41%), followed by medicine and health (22%), engineering (22%), agricultural and environmental sciences (10%), and social sciences (5%). The quality of output, however, presents a more complex picture. While the qualitative standing of these publications—as benchmarked by journal impact and rankings—demonstrates considerable disciplinary variance, engineering consistently performs best. Notably, this longitudinal data suggests that research quality has remained largely stable across most sectors. Nevertheless, a persistent discrepancy remains.
There are three contradictions and discrepancies: the restrictions on STEM research following sanctions, the brain drain from Iran, purges and institutional decline:
1. The STEM paradox of productivity vs quality
The performance of Iranian universities in the first decade of this century shows stark discordance. Science-metric providers noted that between 1996 and 2010, Iran’s scientific output rose 18-fold, from 736 to 13,238 published papers, and that it grew 11 times faster in Iran than the world average (MacKenzie, 2010; Coghlan, 2011). The paradox is that Iran produced more papers than ever before, yet the science behind them was increasingly ignored by the global community. This discord is the direct result of the crippling international sanctions (beginning in earnest in 2012 and re-imposed with enhanced pressure in 2018) imposed on Iran. It fundamentally altered productivity and criminalised knowledge transfer.
The Code of Federal Regulations under U.S. law treats research, teaching, or peer review with Iran as the export of services to a sanctioned country. The list includes Cuba, North Korea, and Syria.
The U.S. government’s Office of Foreign Assets Control approves academic collaboration with entities in sanctioned nations. The web of legal codes covers original research, meta-analyses, reviews, and case reports performed with designated entities.
Opinion pieces and translation services may be partially exempt under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but they still require OFAC review (Miller and Ziad-Miller, 2019). Breaking these rules carries a fine of up to $1 million and 20 years in jail per violation under Title 31 C.F.R. 500-599. Because of these sanctions and statutory restrictions, Iranian researchers struggled to import vital equipment—spectrometers, reagents, and engineering software—from around the world, including the U.S.
According to UN estimates based on country-level data without extrapolation (UNESCO, 2021), Iran’s investment in R&D as a share of GDP in 2018 was 0.83, much higher than India (0.65), Indonesia (0.23), Egypt (0.72), Argentina (0.54), and Mexico (0.31). Moreover, the number of full-time researchers per million inhabitants in 2018 was significantly higher in Iran (1,475) than in India (253), Indonesia (216), Egypt (687), and Argentina (1,192), and was more than double the average for all Arab states combined. Currency collapse, scientific isolation, and psychological strain hindered every aspect of Iranian researchers’ work and crippled science in Iran (Butler, 2019). Many shifted to theoretical modelling and simulation in materials science and nanotechnology. This kept the propensity of churning out publications high, but may have separated scientific and academic research from practical reality and industrial use.
Iranian universities experienced a more rapid transformation in the aftermath of the 2009 domestic protests. Research grants and faculty appointments were increasingly scrutinised by security agencies. Suspicion stifled international collaboration as scholars feared contact with foreign peers would be seen as espionage. The university was no longer viewed as a space for inquiry but as a potential site of soft war against the state. This led to a series of renewed nationwide anti-government protests, followed by the killing of thousands of protestors and activists.
When a nation’s scientific and academic elite are siloed into only local conversations and domestic journals, the iterative process of peer correction stops. The lack of intellectual visibility means that Iranian innovations in medicine or engineering, new ideas in social sciences, and critical reflections rooted in the humanities remain unvetted and unintegrated (Tarikhi, 2020). This isolation does not just hurt academia; it poses a terminal threat to the state’s own goals of civilian self-sufficiency, as it severs links to global R&D cycles and international academia, which are necessary conditions for modern socio-economic progress.
2. The great exodus of brainpower
The most quantifiable tragedy of the last two decades is the flight of human capital, or brain drain. Iran consistently ranks among the top countries for the emigration of its highly educated elite (Azadi et al., 2020). According to the International Monetary Fund estimates (IMF 2024), the annual loss of human capital from Iran is equivalent to an economic loss of over $50 billion—nearly matching the nation’s peak oil revenues in some years.
This must not be viewed as a choice made by individuals, but as an inevitable reaction to the deterioration of the “transnational social space” (Cooke and Wood 2026). Several factors were at play – an excessive inflation rate, a severely devalued currency, a disconnect from the economic benefits of globalisation, and a large population starved of the socio-cultural benefits of liberalisation. More importantly, the institutionalised ideological purge led to severe restrictions on the academic environment and the dilution of institutional autonomy in the garb of purifying scientific thought and inquiry. The classification of students (a legal mechanism to ban politically active students from education) and the 2022 protests (‘Woman, Life, Freedom’) led to a massive crackdown on university campuses.
For a PhD scholar in Engineering, for instance, the choice became clear: stay in an economy with 40% inflation, governed by a hyperbole-infused political system with limited freedom of research, or emigrate to another country as soon as possible. This led to a profound sense of “psychosocial despair” among the educated Iranian thought leaders.
This exodus of talent has created a missing middle class in the Iranian economy. Iran awards several doctorates and trains many scientists every year. However, the lack of an internationally benchmarked legal framework to protect intellectual property and the dominance of quasi-state foundations over the private sector resulted in a fractured innovation ecosystem incapable of absorbing them. Iran’s investment in education effectively serves as a major subsidy to other nations where these scholars eventually settle, create new knowledge, publish their academic research, and file patents for foreign organisations.
3. Purges and institutional decline
The institutional decline of the Iranian university reached a tipping point during the 2021–2023 purge. This “Second Cultural Revolution” was framed as a strategy to “purify” universities in the wake of protests. In a punitive shake-up designed to eliminate dissent, the state expelled and, in some cases, imprisoned thousands of school principals and professors. These academicians were not merely removed; they were replaced by loyal propagandists.
The substitution of expertise for ideology has been described as “a coup by the security apparatus against science” (Stevenson 2024). This hollowing out of the faculty directly correlates with the plummeting qualitative rankings of Iranian institutions, as the replacement cohort lacks the international standing and research history of their predecessors.
Over the last 20 years, the performance of Iranian universities in global rankings has presented a deceptive picture. On the surface, institutions such as the University of Tehran and Sharif University maintained, or even improved, their positions through the mid-2010s. Quantitatively, these two Iranian universities ranked among the top 500 in the Times Higher Education (THE) rankings across parameters. However, a deeper analysis reveals a different story. While citation counts are high—sometimes bolstered by internal citation networks—scores for “International Outlook” and “Industry Income” have stagnated (THE, 2025). While Iran once outpaced regional rivals such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia in STEM fields, the last decade has seen a reversal. While top Saudi Arabian universities aggressively invested in global talent, Iranian labs have struggled with basic equipment, leading to a plateau in scientific breakthroughs.
To improve its standing in global university rankings, the government implemented a legal mandate requiring PhD students to publish in journals used by ranking agencies such as QS in their methodologies to graduate. This led to a culture of a “publication factory”, often marred by self-citation and, in some cases, the proliferation of predatory publishing to meet state-imposed quotas, leading to “modernity without development” (Sadeh et al. 2019). In the Times Higher Education rankings, Iranian universities consistently score in the bottom decile on the ‘International Outlook’ parameter. The lack of foreign faculty, the declining number of international collaborators and co-authors in scholarly work, and the isolation of domestic researchers—exacerbated by developments that began in 2025—have further damaged these institutions (Hashjin et al., 2025).
Repression mechanisms also led to the gradual demise of leading Iranian institutions. Reports of nationwide internet shutdowns and communications blackouts in early 2026, prior to the attack by the U.S. and Israeli forces, indicate a state strategy to conceal human rights violations and suppress the documentation of the crackdown on students and faculty (Amnesty International 2026; Associated Press 2026). These shutdowns represent a deliberate attempt to isolate Iranian academia from global oversight and commentary.
Innovation in Isolation
Despite the hollowing out of academic institutions, Iran maintained a high Innovation Efficiency Ratio, ranking 11th globally (Kokabisaghi et al. 2019). The most damning evidence of the decline in scientific temperament lies in the disconnect between scientific papers and industrial reality, such that Iran’s rank on international innovation indicators remains unnoticeable (Akhondzadeh, 2017). While scientific papers grew by nearly 500% between 2005 and 2018, Iranian filings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office or the European Patent Office – two of the largest patent offices in the world – remained negligible.
This is not surprising. According to the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO), most Iranian patents are utility models filed domestically, which lack the global novelty required for international competitiveness (WIPO 2025). Further, there is a near-total absence of knowledge spillover from the university to the manufacturing sector. The Iranian automotive industry, for instance, continues to rely on decades-old foreign platforms despite having thousands of domestic papers in advanced automotive engineering (Mazdeh et al., 2016). The focus of Iranian innovation, despite being limited in rigour and application, has shifted from civil advancement to military reconstitution (Spruk, 2026). Having suffered irreversible losses to military and civilian infrastructure during the 2024 Israeli campaign, the 12-Day War of June 2025, and the conflict with the U.S., which began early March 2026, Tehran has pivoted its remaining scientific talent in what can only be termed an existential fight for survival.
The Future of the Iranian Academia
The transformation of higher education and research in Iran over the last twenty years is a cautionary tale in cultural sociology and a warning in political economy. Iran has transitioned from a global colleague with high rates of international collaboration to an isolated, ideologically purged state that has pivoted its innovation engine toward survival. The outward migration of talented Iranians continues to pose a terminal threat to the nation’s long-term prosperity.
Protection for free exchange of ideas without any censorship or repression, and irrespective of creed, is the raison d’être for a modern egalitarian society. It is the necessary condition for shared prosperity. The sufficient condition, though, is the preservation of scientific temperament, which is the common but differentiated responsibility of all citizens and the state. But when a state tries to replace its professors with propagandists, students with sycophants, scholarship with sanctimonious rhetoric, intellectuals with influencers, it begins a painful journey towards imminent stagnation. History is replete with instances when men in power placed primacy on narcissistic rage for absolute dominance over building trust-based social cohesion. Everything else becomes secondary – the precision of the most advanced missiles, rich civilisational history, and even the capitalist might of the economy.
It was, after all, a philosopher and not a historian who said that “we learn from history that we do not learn from history” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel). Surely a vital lesson for Iran, but several nation-states and their leaders will do well to recognise this, for their own societies and humanity.
Ashish Bharadwaj is the Distinguished Fellow for Law and Education, Gateway House.
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Endnotes:
*Note: This is a non-exhaustive list based on an online search. Several webpages were either blocked or had broken links. The fields of cooperation are indicative and may not include all the areas of cooperation. Some signed MoUs are currently active, while others may have lapsed. Partnerships/collaborations vary in scope (student mobility, summer schools, joint research) and in who the host institution is for visiting students & scholars. Depending on available information, the year could indicate the year of commencement, the year of termination, or the year the MoU was signed.
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