1998 29 Sep
199- |
Starting this date until October 2nd, in Iran, the government raided some 500 private homes and the arrested some 30 faculty members in efforts to close the Bahá'í Institute for Higher Education, a decentralized university that aimed to give Bahá'í students access to the education they have been otherwise denied.
The Institute offered Bachelor's degrees in ten subject areas: applied chemistry, biology, dental science, pharmacological science, civil engineering, computer science, psychology, law, literature, and accounting. Within these subject areas, which were administered by five "departments," the Institute was able to offer more than 200 distinct courses each term.
In the beginning, courses were based on correspondence lessons developed by Indiana University, which was one of the first institutions in the West to recognize the Bahá'í Institute for Higher Education. Later on, course offerings were developed internally.
Teaching was done principally via correspondence, or, for specialized scientific and technical courses and in other special cases, in small-group classes that were usually held in private homes. Over time, however, the Institute was able to establish a few laboratories, operated in privately owned commercial buildings in and around Teheran, for computer science, physics, dental science, pharmacology, applied chemistry, and language study. The operations of these laboratories were kept prudently quiet, with students cautioned not to come and go in large groups that might give the authorities a reason to object.
Among other significant human rights conventions, Iran is a party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 16 December 1966. Parties to this Covenant "recognize the right of everyone to education" and more specifically that "higher education shall be made equally accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means." ["The New York Times" article dated 29 October 1998,
One Country Oct-Dec 1998 Vol 10 Issue 3]
On the 29th of October, 2019, IranWire featured a story on the BIHE and one of its graduates, Pedram Roushan, a physicist originally from Sari in Mazandaran province. On the 28th of August 2020 Pedram Roushan was featured in another IranWire article about his work with the Google Artificial Intelligence Quantum team. They had just published an article called Hartree-Fock on a superconducting qubit quantum computer in "Science Magazine". |
Bahá'í Institute for Higher Education (BIHE); * Persecution, Iran; - Persecution, Education; - Persecution; Human rights; Education; Pedram Roushan; Iran |
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