Dr Jamilesadat Alamolhoda Personal Website
The greatest challenge of Iranian universities today is freedom
Dr. Jamileh Sadat Alamolhoda stated in the 58th meeting of vice-presidencies for education of universities and higher education institutions across the country, which was held today at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad:
“Identifying university challenges in the direction of development is one of the important issues of universities today. Iranian universities are facing serious challenges in the path of development, the most important of which is freedom.
Education relies on freedom of will, and if there is no free will, education is meaningless. Therefore, the freedom of students and professors in the university is a basic principle for the realization of education.
The bureaucratic approach prevailing in the university has caused freedom and the university to diverge from each other and education cannot be realized. With the dominance of the bureaucratic approach in the university, education has been reduced to a disciplinary technology and the professor has become a bureaucrat.”
The dean of Shahid Beheshti University’s Institute for Science and Technology Studies acknowledged: “Contrary to the intensification of bureaucratic discipline in the university, we continue to see the active participation of students and professors in the affairs of the university. However, unfortunately, due to the conflict among the groups that compete with each other in the interpretation of the public good, we are facing the spread of law-aversion, supervision-aversion, bargaining, rent-seeking, all kinds of fraud, etc.
In order to reduce or solve the problems caused by this type of conflict, rules and laws and disciplinary structures, both encouraging and punitive, were developed and in fact they have governed a kind of behavioral order and uniformity, which is referred to under various titles, including ‘socialization’.
The best word for this challenge is the freedom of speech that exists in the university. There is a conflict and divergence between the freedom of expression in speech and behavior with the university order.”
In the end, the president’s wife stated: “There is only one way for the ‘freedom challenge in the university’; to return to Imam Khomeini’s interpretation of education, which is revealed in his works, especially in the very important and memorable sentence ‘teaching is the prophets’ job’.” In this way, Alamolhoda introduced the educational approach as an alternative to the management approach and emphasized that in this approach the professor appears as a leader and not as a bureaucrat.
Wednesday and Thursday, July 6-7, 2022
