Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Monday, July 11, 2011

Sort of separate and equal

Is this another round in the struggle between Iran's supreme leader and the president?

Ahmadinejad opposes plans to segregate the sexes in Iran’s universities, rightist alarmed

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has ordered the immediate cancellation of plans to segregate sexes at some universities, blasting the move as “shallow and unwise.”

“In some universities, single-gender courses and classes are implemented without considering their consequences,” the president said in a letter to the ministers of higher education and health that was published on his website.

“It is necessary that these shallow and unwise actions are prevented immediately,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said against the backdrop of a lively debate in the media and among officials over reports of plans to divide female and male students.

The order comes during a campaign by the ultra-conservative and religious camps dominating the Iranian regime for the abolition of co-education in universities for the new academic year…

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s opposition to sex segregation will further alienate his conservative and religious critics, who have becoming increasingly outspoken against him and his circle of advisers they say belong to a “deviant current” that puts secular nationalism ahead of Islam and poses a potential threat to Iran’s clerical rule.

Seen as an extreme hardliner by many in the West due to his comments against Israel and his country’s refusal to curb its nuclear program, at home the populist Mr. Ahmadinejad is outflanked on the right by ultra-conservatives, who charge that he has not adhered closely enough to the values of the Islamic Revolution.

More than half of Iran’s 3.7 million students are women, studying alongside their male classmates, and education has become a focus for conservatives who want to head off what they consider corrosive western values among the youth born long after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

On the instruction of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran is already reviewing the curricula of certain subjects deemed too western, including law, philosophy, psychology and political sciences, to ensure they do not run counter to Islamic teachings…