Private universities are a rapidly expanding form of education in Iran, and increasingly include Islam and the social sciences alongside the hard sciences too. What implications does the privatization of religious and social scientific knowledge have for the Islamic Republic? Scholarship has so far responded by looking at the ways in which the Iranian authoritarian state has monopolized religion, repressed the social sciences and hollowed out student activism. Complicating these arguments, this article provides a historical and institutional comparison of higher education in Iran in order to look at the evolving degree of autonomy of academic institutions and the ability of actors that operate within them to contribute to critical debate, social activism and novel discourse. The article proposes that while state universities and Islamic Azad suffer from politicization and control, a small set of privately owned “Islamic” universities is using its elite connections, financial independence and socio-pedagogical ties to the seminary and modern academia to secure enhanced levels of free debate and independent thinking.
This paper qualitatively compares Mazinani’s model for the measurement of freedom, the called Full Freedom model, with the Human Development Index (HDI) and the Freedom of the World Index (FWI) and examines the advantages and disadvantages of using this model for the measurement of freedom in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The particularity of historical trajectories in the MENA will be held against the HDI and FWI. Then, shortcomings in Mazinani’s model for the measurement of freedom will be assessed in relation to this model’s dependency on its two competitors.
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