The excitement I once felt arriving at Yale University from Tehran in 2023 for my studies quickly turned into concerns about my safety as an anti-regime Iranian. At school, I witnessed the unchallenged authority of Islamic Republic sympathizers in American universities. Faculty tied to the regime have long presented themselves as presumptive Iranian voices, normalizing the regime’s illegitimate rule by erasing the realities of Iranians living in Iran.
Yale’s fall 2025 course catalogue, for instance, features a class by now-disgraced U.S. diplomat Robert Malley, who led negotiations for the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal, under former President Barack Obama.
Malley’s class will “examine the past in order to better appreciate the two governments’ worldviews” and place students “in the shoes of U.S. and Iranian decision-makers.”
Course assignments for “Adversaries by Design: Deconstructing the Iran-U.S. Relationship” have students cosplaying as diplomats for the regime, as if this is some benign Model U.N.-like exercise rather than a calculated attempt to humanize the theocratic, colonizing dictatorship responsible for the majority of crimes against humanity in the region since 1979.
The course revolves around defending Malley’s failed magnum opus, the JCPOA, and his syllabus mentions having guest lecturers such as Ali Vaez, Hossein Mousavian and Mohammad Javad Zarif, all of whom have acted on behalf of the regime at one time or another. Malley purports to offer “Iranian perspectives,” but the class will likely only feature Islamic Republic officials and supporters.
One might wonder how it’s possible for a former U.S. government official who lost his security clearance and had close contact with Islamic Republic agents to lecture at an elite American university. But fear not! This is Yale, a Western institution where enabling the ideologies of designated terrorist groups is appropriate under the pretense of academia. And this isn’t an isolated incident for Yale.
In a prior semester, Yale offered “Shi’i Islam, History and Legal Thought,” which mirrored a typical Iranian university course, uncritically featuring works by Ali, the first Shia imam, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The instructor was Latifeh Aavani, whose signature appears on a 2017 letter endorsing former Iranian Regime president Hassan Rouhani, the butcher responsible for the 2020 “Bloody November” massacre in Iran. Her father is a scholar of the Basij, a part of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a close friend of the Khomeini family and board member of the “Institute of Wisdom and Philosophy” alongside Ayatollah Khamenei’s brother.
While teaching about Sharia law, the JCPOA and U.S.-Islamic Republic relations won’t necessarily spread the regime’s ideology, uncritically platforming Islamic Republic sympathizers certainly will.
This tradition of laundering the regime’s propaganda goes back years. A glowing Yale Daily News article from 1979, “Yale Student Leads Forces of Khomeini in Washington,” reports on doctoral candidate and Muslim fundamentalist, Shariar Rouhani, who left his studies to become the ayatollah’s official spokesman in Washington.
Aside from national security concerns associated with indoctrinating the next generation of leaders into treating the regime favorably, Malley’s “advocacy” has brushed aside the suffering of my people.
I remember forming my earliest memories in the summer of 2009, the summer of the Green Movement protests in Iran, jumping over pieces of glass. Streets were filled with green worn by anti-regime protesters. The air was heavy with the smell of gunpowder and tear gas, a smell that lingered as I grew up in Tehran.
After the “Bloody November” protests in Iran in 2019, Malley suggested in The New York Times that the massive public protests were reason enough for the Islamic Regime’s paranoia of an “Israeli-Saudi-U.S. plot,” seemingly justifying the regime’s mass murder of peaceful protesters. Members of the International Crisis Group, of which Malley is the former president and CEO, further distorted reality, asserting that Iranians are “not demanding a radical shift.”
I didn’t hear about these lies until much later. Nor did any other Iranians in Iran. We were experiencing a total shutdown of the internet, cell service and electricity. What we heard were gunshots from the regime and the chants of protesters: “We don’t want, we don’t want, the Islamic Republic.”
While Malley and his think-tank employees desperately falsified the reality in Iran, the Islamic Republic murdered at least 1,500 innocent Iranians in less than three days.
For the past 46 years, virtually all Iranian academics have been killed, banned or silenced by the regime for committing thought crimes, which means that regime sympathizers are the ones teaching policymakers and academics. The Iran that Malley and his cohorts present is a facade, the Islamic Republic’s fading illusion of ideological unity and control.
During the genocide of Iranians in the 1980s, Malley was a Yale student and said nothing. In 2021, as Hamas terrorists were preparing for the Oct. 7 massacre, Malley said that he speaks with Hezbollah and Hamas, and that “They have their own rationality … none of them are crazy,” as if having an internal logic justifies their genocidal actions and aspirations.
In 2023, it was reported that Malley helped “fund, support and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments.” And now he’s been given free rein to spread his dangerous rhetoric at Yale. This alone should disqualify him from his post.
The Islamic Republic is evil, but it is not competent. Like all failing dictatorships, violence and deceitful strategies are used to maintain legitimacy. That’s why the regime’s main “soft power” is manipulating the world’s ignorance. Unfortunately, it is succeeding with classes like the one being taught by Malley.
Unlike Iranian students who face imprisonment and death for demanding academic freedom, students in the West have the privilege to demand accountability and transparency from their institutions without fear.
Past and present Yalies need to reach out and demand an explanation for their school’s hiring policies. The school should impose an audit on Malley’s class and put more effort into supporting diverse views on Iran. Additionally, all community members interested in maintaining Yale’s reputation as an elite institution should protest this blatant attempt to indoctrinate students.
This article was originally published in Jewish News Syndicate.
