American college students love to protest anything these days but they know very little of real repression.

This report from Elizabeth Redden at Inside Higher Ed is very enlightening.

‘Silenced, Expelled, Imprisoned’

A new report from Amnesty International documents the crackdown on Iranian students and scholars that came in the wake of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election in 2005.

The report, which is based on interviews with more than 50 individuals with direct knowledge of Iran’s higher education system and an analysis of publicly available documents and media reports, is titled “Silenced, Expelled, Imprisoned: Repression of Students and Academics in Iran.” It provides specific information on the cases of student activists and scholars who were imprisoned on national security-related charges or allegations of insulting government leaders in connection with their participation in the mass protests that followed Ahmadinejad’s disputed reelection in 2009. Many remain behind bars today.

The report also traces how Ahmadinejad renewed and redoubled efforts to further “Islamicize” Iranian higher education, by, for example, tightening rules on gender segregation and dress code, suspending and expelling student activists and banning them from continuing their education elsewhere, cancelling or revising humanities courses deemed to be Western-influenced and “un-Islamic,” and dismissing or forcing the retirement of faculty perceived as being “secular” or “reformist.”

Furthermore, the Amnesty International report describes official government efforts to restrict university participation on the part of women – who by 2007 were reported to represent more than 58 percent of university enrollment – by imposing quotas on female enrollment in certain degree programs and closing off their participation in others (such as mining engineering). As the report documents, members of Iran’s unrecognized minority religions, including the Baha’is, have largely been denied access to higher education since shortly after the Islamic Revolution in 1979.