Iran President Facing Revival of Students’ Ire

Some Iranian students have decided that their president’s bluster doesn’t provide much in the way of jobs or progress. A similar student movement in 1979 overthrew the Iranian government and introduced control by Islamic clerics. More than 20 years later, protesting students are described as wanting more academic and personal freedoms by journalist Nazila Fathi in “The New York Times.” Students at Amir Kabir University of Technology disrupted a speech by the president and express alarm that the nation with the fourth largest oil reserves has a struggling economy and few good jobs – led by a president who focuses on denying the Holocaust as a historical event, squashes reform by imposing religious restrictions and firing popular professors. The protests came just before national elections, the first since 2005 when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office. In the elections, moderate reform candidates defeated supporters of Ahmadinejad. – YaleGlobal