In the weeks following the outbreak of the war between the US-Israel alliance and Iran, professors and student groups around the country have painted the Iranian regime as a force of anti-colonial resistance rather than as one of the prime instigators of global terrorism and regional destabilization. When professors use their positions of influence in academia to advance propaganda for the Islamic Regime, students have a responsibility to evaluate what they hear on campus.

Hamid Dabashi, a tenured professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University, said in January 2026 that the civil uprising in Iran was “illegitimate” because of American and Israeli support. Although he has criticized the regime, he stated during the June 2025 strikes on Iran that “I would rather see Iran struggling under the corrupt tyranny of the ruling Islamist regime than destroyed under the Israeli bombs.” In other words, Iranians shouldn’t be free when Israel is attacking their actual oppressors. 

This past April, Associate Professor of Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Washington and former Director of the Middle East Center, Aria Fani, sent an email to students accusing Israel of committing acts of terrorism during the recent war and Zionism as “cancerous, a potentially fatal outgrowth in our planetary body.” If this isn’t a blatant attempt at indoctrinating students, I’m not sure what is. 

Youseph Yazdi, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, downplayed the regime’s crackdown on the January 2026 protests, claiming ”they have batons, and they have tear gas........

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