Iran’s rulers have good reason to fear the reopening of the universities. On September 28, students at Allameh Tabataba’i University in Tehran poured onto their campus to protest against rising educational costs, compulsory hijab, deteriorating conditions, and the suffocating intrusion of security forces into university life. They demanded the release of imprisoned students. Videos showed protesters chanting against tyranny and the morality police. One slogan encapsulated their anger. “Neither barracks nor business enterprise. Long live the university.” That cry should reverberate through the corridors of power in Tehran.

Iran’s students are among the best educated young people in the Middle East. They study engineering, medicine, physics, computer science, law, economics, and the humanities. They inhabit the digital age. They see how their contemporaries live elsewhere. They know what freedom looks like, and they know what they are missing. They also know who stole their future. For decades, the clerical dictatorship has squandered Iran’s immense human and natural resources on repression at home and conflict abroad. Young Iranians have watched billions poured into the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its regional ambitions while their economy deteriorated and their opportunities disappeared. They have watched corruption flourish while families struggle. They have watched women beaten, arrested, and imprisoned for demanding basic rights. They have watched brilliant graduates contemplate emigration because their own country offers them unemployment, repression, and ideological conformity.

Most dangerously for the regime, they have learned to ask why. That question terrifies every dictatorship. The protest at Allameh did not emerge from nowhere. When universities reopened in........

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