Losing Hearts and Minds: American-Iranian Relations and International Education during the Cold War

By Matthew K. Shannon

Matthew K. Shannon provides readers with a reminder of a brief and congenial phase of the relationship between the United States and Iran. In Losing Hearts and Minds, Shannon tells the story of an influx of Iranian students to American college campuses between 1950 and 1979 that globalized U.S. institutions of higher education and produced alliances between Iranian youths and progressive Americans.

Losing Hearts and Minds is a narrative rife with historical ironies. Because of its superpower competition with the USSR, the U.S. government worked with nongovernmental organizations to create the means for Iranians to train and study in the United States. The stated goal of this initiative was to establish a cultural foundation for the official relationship and to provide Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with educated elites to administer an ambitious program of socioeconomic development. Despite these goals, Shannon locates the incubation of at least one possible version of the Iranian Revolution on American college campuses, which provided a space for a large and vocal community of dissident Iranian students to organize against the Pahlavi regime and earn the support of empathetic Americans. Together they rejected the Shah’s authoritarian model of development and called for civil and political rights in Iran, giving unwitting support to the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781501712340

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LOSING HEARTS AND MINDS

American-Iranian Relations and International Education during the Cold War

Matthew K. Shannon

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS     ITHACA AND LONDON

For Samantha

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Foundation

2. The Window

3. The Youth

4. The Boom

5. The Reckoning

Conclusion

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book, as with any decade-long project, owes so much to so many. It began at Temple University, where I was fortunate to have a broad support network. The anchor was Richard Immerman, and he provided feedback on all chapters in their crudest forms. I usually received that feedback so quickly that I had barely reflected on my arguments before he compelled me to consider new ones. He was a model critic who pushed me to explore new questions and frameworks without losing sight of the fundamental question of power in the international system. Conversations with Petra Goedde also generated new research questions, and it was with her that I first began to think about the question of human rights in American-Iranian relations. She helped me understand how to connect histories of ideas and nonstate actors with the diplomacy of nations. David Farber has an uncanny ability to cut to the heart of any research project, and his influence kept this book conversant with postwar American narratives. I am grateful to all three for helping me learn how to write history that focuses on the diplomatic, transnational, and domestic aspects of the contemporary past.

During my time in Philadelphia, there was a vibrant history department on the ninth floor of Gladfelter Hall. I learned a lot about the profession from Beth Bailey, Arthur Schmidt, and William Hitchcock. It was a pleasure to be part of a great cohort, too. Thanks are due to Ben Brandenberg, Carly Goodman, David Guba, Drew McKevitt, Tom Reinstein, Tim Sayle, Kelly Shannon, Matt Unangst, and Silke Zoller. For most of us, the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy was a second home. CENFAD enriched the already dynamic environment in Philadelphia and provided me with generous support on multiple occasions. I was especially fortunate to serve as the Thomas Davis Fellow during the 2010–11 academic year and to be part of the three-year Hertog Program in Grand Strategy. Outside of the foreign policy world, it was a thrill to close out my time at Temple as a fellow with the Center for the Humanities, a pleasant home to a lively group of scholars whose diverse methodologies kept my mind fresh when I thought that I had things figured out.

The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations has been a constant source of support and inspiration. I thank my fellow panelists from the 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2015 meetings for giving me a convenient excuse to present early drafts of this book’s chapters and to think about American-Iranian relations in different contexts. As any member of SHAFR knows, the list of friends runs long, but I greatly appreciate the friendship of Matt D. Jacobs and Doug Snyder for their always-thoughtful conversations. Thanks, too, to the small group of Iran specialists that over the years has included Roham Alvandi, Claudia Castiglioni, Vittorio Felci, Richard Garlitz, Roland Popp, and others whose archival revelations routinely challenge old assumptions. Outside of SHAFR, I thank my fellow participants at the human rights workshops hosted by Howard University and the University of California, Davis, in 2010 and 2011 respectively, and the German Historical Institute and the Center for Advanced Studies of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität for sponsoring conferences on student migration and international education in 2011.

Others also warrant a special acknowledgment. Jim Goode has been nothing but supportive. His scholarship has repeatedly pushed boundaries, and I welcome every opportunity to talk with him about Iran. The same is true for W. Taylor Fain. He, along with others in the history department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, inspired me to study history and has since provided expert advice at all the right moments. I also thank Michael McGandy of Cornell University Press for patiently working with me throughout this process. He and two anonymous readers asked the tough questions and helped me understand that a historical monograph is very different from any other form of academic writing.

While any misstatements are entirely my own, all of these individuals helped me think in different ways about the long-term narrative of historical change over time in American-Iranian relations. Rather than drill into a particular episode or decade of the binational relationship, this book looks at the entirety of the U.S. relationship with the last shah’s Iran. All historical frames must be clearly defined, though, and the narrative thread that weaves through this book follows a particular connector, namely, international education and the resulting stream of Iranian student migration to the United States. I tell this story from the perspective of America and the world. This historical subfield is not diplomatic or military history in a new guise; nor is it an entirely new subfield that discards old insights for what can be fleeting methodological trends. It is both a history from above that, in this case, considers the opinions of presidents, diplomats, policymakers, and politicians, and a history from below that takes the pulse of student life in the United States and analyzes ideas, culture, and circuits of movement and exchange. The history of America and the world is the history of the nation, its peoples, and people from all over the globe operating within a web of political, military, economic, and cultural relations. In other words, my narrative places the question of power within the American-Iranian relationship before the 1979 revolution within its broader international and transnational contexts.

This book’s narrative is driven by that fuel of historical research: archival documents, more specifically, English-language documents that reconstruct the points of connection between Iranian students and a range of official and unofficial Americans. Researching a process with many stakeholders that evolved over four decades took me to a wide variety of government and nongovernmental archives. I owe more than I could ever express to the countless archivists from California eastward to Great Britain who guided me through their collections. I tracked down the documents of the American Friends of the Middle East from various repositories, did targeted research at the Rockefeller Archive Center and universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and combed through the papers of various social change movements at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Still, government documents remain essential to any researcher of U.S. foreign relations. This book is informed by material from the John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter Presidential Libraries. It is also informed by a host of record groups at National Archives II in College Park, Maryland, especially those of the Department of State, the U.S. Information Agency, and the various military and aid missions that operated in Iran. Any researcher of international education knows too well that the records of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs are not with their kin in College Park but at the University of Arkansas; I am indebted to the archivists there for getting a large box of paper to me in such a timely manner. Documents from the National Archives of the United Kingdom also contextualize key moments in this book, and a trip to Kew is worthwhile to any student of international affairs.

I have recovered Iranian voices from a number of sources. The Ford Foundation grant files provide insight into the inner workings of the Iranian bureaucracy. The papers of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas at the Library of Congress contain letters to and from Iranian student leaders in the United States, along with oppositionist publications that were circulated widely, including in the Supreme Court. The records of the International Commission of the U.S. National Student Association house a wealth of material and indicate that young American activists from the United States and Iran conversed regularly about international politics. I have also accumulated from various archives from Palo Alto to Manhattan, and with the indefatigable support of interlibrary loan librarians at three institutions, my own collection of English-language Iranian student publications. The history that emerges from these documents is of America’s relationship with Iran during the decades between the Second World War and the Iranian Revolution. But the extent to which Iranians had an impact on the United States, individual Americans, and global discourses on modernization and human rights is quite remarkable.

Beyond documents, a major source of this book’s Iranian inspiration comes from an individual and an experience. The individual was Jerry Dekker, who spent countless hours with me on the telephone discussing all things Persian over a few years’ time. A scholar of the Middle East and tireless promoter of citizen diplomacy between the United States and Iran whose heart was closer to poetry than politics, Jerry was instrumental in arranging my first experience in Iran. The three weeks that I spent in Iran in mid-2015 transformed the way that I thought about the country, its warm people, and rich cultures. It is difficult to explain how volleyball in a park in Kermanshah, a conversation outside a mosque in Isfahan, or a cool walk in Hamadan’s hills affects the way one approaches the study of the past—but it does. I am grateful to Mozaffar, Maliheh, and Phillip for helping to make my time in Iran so enjoyable and rewarding.

I would be remiss not to thank Emory and Henry College, a small liberal arts college in southwest Virginia that has been my intellectual home for the past four years. My colleagues have been great company and a wealth of methodological inspiration. Tom Little and Jack Wells are fine historians, and they keep the department running smoothly. Alise Coen and Mark Finney are wonderful friends, Celeste Gaia an international educator par excellence, and Ed Davis and Shelley Koch a constant delight. I am grateful for the Melon grants that I received from Emory and Henry in the summers of 2014 and 2015 to support international travel and research on this book. The most important part of the past four years in Emory has been the ways in which teaching the liberal arts in small classrooms (an increasing rarity these days) feeds into my research in unexpected ways. A special thanks goes to the students who have taken my senior seminar on Iran and the West. Their curious comments and relentless questioning have forced me to think more thoroughly and comprehensively about the ties between the United States and Iran.

The most important base of support throughout this process, and in life in general, has been my family. My parents have always assisted me in every way imaginable. Conversations with my mother combined with rounds of golf and baseball outings with my father to provide much needed respite from work during graduate school. My brother is always great fun, whether in Munich or Austin. My grandmother, Pearl Shannon, was always encouraging. I’m sure that she is somewhere smiling with a twinkle in her eye. The therapeutic walks on which my dog, Bonzo, took me provided the best endings to long days of writing. Finally, I thank Samantha. A historian herself, she edited and commented on the drafts of the manuscript. Most inspiring, it was her love that for so long provided me with the energy to meet each day’s challenge.

Introduction

EDUCATION BETWEEN IRAN AND THE WEST

It was November 1977 and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (r. 1941–79) was in Washington, D.C., for his twelfth and final state visit to the United States. During his nearly four decades in power, Iran’s last shah knew eight U.S. presidents and manipulated the court of public opinion to establish an image of a benevolent and modernizing monarch despite the illiberal nature of Iranian politics during the Pahlavi era. On the eve of the Iranian Revolution, however, Iranians at home and abroad were no longer willing to sacrifice personal rights for national development. This was true in 1977 for the tens of thousands of Iranian students in the United States, many of whom criticized the Pahlavi state and U.S. support for it through the language of human rights. Iranian students had a history of confronting the shah during state visits. Over the years they petitioned presidents and members of Congress, organized with like-minded Americans, published pamphlets, wrote articles, and picketed with signs to express their opinions, often using masks to conceal their identity. But the 1977 protest was different. The tension between the shah’s U.S.-backed approach to modernization and the opposition’s demands for civil and political rights exploded on November 11. As Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter greeted the shah and his empress on the south lawn of the White House, some seventeen hundred anti-shah students and nineteen hundred of the shah’s supporters (many hired by the Iranian government) rehearsed for an imminent revolution. When police responded, shifting winds took the tear gas they sprayed at the protesters toward the White House, forcing a teary-eyed president and his guests to reach for their handkerchiefs. Students in Tehran staged simultaneous demonstrations and those in the United States touted their victory in Washington (see Figure 1). Carter later described the embarrassing scene as an augury of things to come.¹ Why were so many Iranian students in the United States, and what accounted for such an astounding manifestation of diaspora politics in Washington on the eve of the Iranian Revolution?

FIGURE 1.   The effects of tear gas and revolutionary student politics on the American and Iranian heads of state in November 1977. Note the students’ use of human rights and torture to criticize the Carter administration’s Iran policy and the shah’s international reputation. ISAUS, Resistance, December 1977, 1, ISAP.

Courtesy of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

The answer is a cold war story. During the cold war, the threat of nuclear war forced the superpowers to wage war by other means and to compete to win the hearts and minds of people around the world. Hard power—particularly wars along the periphery of the Eurasian core and economic might at home and among allies—was central to American and Soviet cold war strategies. But soft power, defined as the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion, became an essential tactic of the larger U.S. strategy of containment.² Education, a form of soft power with the ability to transform nations and, perhaps, to win hearts and minds, became a means by which the United States could cultivate friendly relations with nations at risk of falling under Soviet influence. In this sense, international education was the fourth dimension of U.S. strategy, alongside military, economic, and political affairs.³ The arrival of Americans in Iran to provide technical, military, and educational assistance was one side of the coin; student migration to the United States was the other.⁴ As the superpowers moved from total war to total diplomacy, there were few countries outside of Europe where the United States waged total cold war with more intensity than Iran.⁵

In strictly geostrategic terms, Iran was significant to U.S. policymakers. It shared a sixteen hundred-mile border with the Soviet Union to the north, adjoined the Persian Gulf to the south, and sat atop 10 percent of the world’s petroleum deposits. The shah and his American supporters wanted to keep Iran anticommunist and integrated into the global economy. Together, they established a relationship that gave the United States a toehold in the Persian Gulf, created a bulwark against Soviet expansion along the northern tier of the Middle East, guaranteed the outward flow of Iranian oil, and strengthened the shah’s repressive security state. The classic narrative of U.S.-Iran relations during the shah’s reign centers on these geostrategic considerations and consists of state-centered histories that pay little attention to transnational ideas and actors.⁶ The best of the recent scholarship focuses either on particular episodes in U.S.-Iran relations or fleshes out the classic narrative of diplomacy and arms deals.⁷

This book reinterprets American-Iranian relations through the lens of international education. Although the official American entrance into Iranian life occurred during the Second World War, 1950 gave birth to the first sustained exchange programs as Iranian Fulbright scholars began to arrive in the United States and education became the centerpiece to U.S. technical and military assistance programs in Iran. The start of the Iran Hostage Crisis in November 1979 and the severance of official diplomatic relations in April 1980 marked the end of the educational project that began during the early years of the cold war and the beginning of a new, chillier era of U.S.-Iran relations. The interpretation that follows favors the epochal over the episodic, and it foregrounds the remarkable number of individuals inside and outside of government who shaped the contours of the binational relationship. It demonstrates that there was nothing inevitable about thirty-seven years of U.S. support for the Shah of Iran.

Losing Hearts and Minds argues that international education served a dual function in the American-Iranian relationship. The volume of Iranian student migration to the United States was evidence of an intercultural dialogue exceptional in the history of America’s relationship with the world. The Iranian student population grew from a mere five hundred in 1950 to upward of fifty thousand in the late 1970s to become the largest national group of students in the United States by the onset of the Iranian Revolution. U.S. policymakers, diplomats, aid officials, philanthropists, and educationalists created a vast array of government-sponsored and nongovernmental educational programs to lay a cultural foundation for the Washington-Tehran alliance and to supply the shah with trained manpower to administer his modernization program, known as the White Revolution. Iranian alumni of American universities were elected to the Iranian parliament (majlis), entered the shah’s bureaucracy, staffed the Plan Organization and the National Iranian Oil Company, worked in the financial sector, served in the armed forces, joined university faculties, and assumed the premiership. During their time abroad, Iranian students mingled with their American friends, shared ideas, and were the most important linkage figures between the two countries from the Second World War to the Iranian Revolution.⁸

International education was not simply a means toward a strategic end that was defined by the U.S. and Iranian governments, however. It also provided a means of resistance. Iranian students abroad produced one of the most impressive oppositional movements of the cold war era, and their movement expanded in size and diversified in composition over the years as the shah refused to include political liberalization as part of his modernization program. Because the Pahlavi state did not tolerate opposition within its borders, dissent became part of the educational networks that connected the United States and Iran. Although Washington supported the shah in the name of security and development, most anti-shah students distinguished between the U.S. government and the American people. That distinction made it possible for Iranian students to serve as unofficial ambassadors and form an alternate alliance with progressive Americans critical of the shah’s authoritarianism.⁹ Iranian students and their American allies adopted worldviews that transcended traditional calculations of national interest, served as an alternative power center to national governments, and engaged in an evolving human rights discourse to delegitimize the shah’s claim to be a benevolent and modernizing monarch. Their evolving rights-based critique of the Pahlavi state reached the halls of power in Washington and Tehran, reshaped the international community, and contributed to the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that replaced the shah’s Iran with Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini’s Islamic Republic.

Iran, Education, and the Modern World

International education was a defining feature of Iran’s and the broader Middle East’s modern encounter with the West. Iranian culture has always valued education, an emphasis found in texts ranging from Zoroastrian scriptures to Saadi’s poems.¹⁰ But two developments precipitated the establishment of educational contacts between Iran and the West as the modern world system took shape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. First, the nation-building project in Iran that began during the nineteenth century depended on a well-educated cadre of military officers and civil servants to protect Iran’s sovereignty and administer nationalizing reforms. What began as a defensive response to European imperialism evolved until the 1970s when Iran, an oil-rich U.S. ally, was able to dictate the terms of its own development. Second, Europeans and Americans saw education as a means to remake Iran in their own post-Enlightenment image. Before the Second World War, Presbyterian missionaries were the face of American soft power and the chosen instruments that introduced new ideas to Iran.¹¹ Nongovernmental organizations remained active after the war, but the U.S. government assumed greater responsibility for directing Iranian student migration as part of a broader cold war strategy. While the ties between Iran and the United States were as strong as ever during the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the tension between development and rights was never resolved.

From the Napoleonic Wars (1798–1815) through the First World War (1914–18), education was the centerpiece of the defensive development efforts of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire.¹² The gunpowder empires of the Middle East enjoyed military superiority during the early modern era, but Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 shifted the balance of power in Europe’s favor. Military setbacks compelled reform-minded Egyptian khedives and Ottoman sultans to create new militaries that were centrally administered, filled with conscripts, and staffed by salaried officers versed in European ways of war. Egypt’s Mohammad Ali (r. 1805–48) led the way when he staffed his new officer school in Aswan with European teachers and sent teams of Egyptians to France to study war. Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–39) followed suit. He opened the Imperial War College, brought in British, French, and Prussian officers to train his army and navy, and sent military men to Europe. Leaders in Cairo and Istanbul also broke the religious establishment’s hold on land, law, and public life, established new schools that emphasized European languages, and sent young elites and civil servants to study in European capitals. As the Egyptian and Ottoman states grew, they needed technocrats, or French knowers, to guide the bureaucratic reforms. By the mid-nineteenth century, the path to state employment passed through Paris, and the road to nationalism passed through the new militaries, bureaucracies, and secular education systems.¹³

A similar process unfolded in Iran during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Qajar Dynasty (1785–1925) established the first links between national development and international education.¹⁴ In 1811 the modernizing crown prince, Abbas Mirza, arranged for two Persians to study medicine in England. Five others left in 1815 to study engineering and military sciences. The Qajars expected their young subjects to acquire skills in Europe and, upon return, help ward off Great Britain and Russia, two empires that competed for influence in Southwest Asia during the Great Game of the nineteenth century. In 1845, after suffering two crushing military defeats at the hands of Imperial Russia, Naser ad-Din Shah financed a self-strengthening mission of five Persians to study military tactics and strategy in France. The establishment in 1851 of a polytechnic in Tehran, the Dar al-Fonun, opened up valuable training to many more Iranians but did little to curtail Iran’s reliance on European education. Realizing its importance, the Qajars renewed their commitment to international education in 1911 by designating thirty government scholarships for study abroad. When the First World War came to a close in 1918, approximately five hundred Persians were enrolled in European universities, two hundred of whom resided in France.

Iran’s educational connections with the world accelerated under the Pahlavi Dynasty (1925–79). After toppling the last Qajar shah, a former Cossack Brigade commander named Reza Khan assumed the title Reza Pahlavi, pulling his dynastic name from a pre-Islamic Persian script. He centralized state authority by undercutting the influence of the clergy (ulama) in the schools and courts, an approach that signaled his determination to put secular education and European ideas to the service of the state. In 1928 he signed a law that paid for 640 students to go to Europe, and in 1934 he opened Tehran University, an institution based on the French educational model that remains Iran’s first and most prestigious institution of higher learning. When Tehran University’s doors opened, only 16 of the 1,175 Iranian students abroad were in the United States.¹⁵ In fact, only 130 Iranians went to the United States between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹⁶ It was not until the cold war that the tide of Iranian student migration shifted away from Europe and toward the United States.

While few Iranians studied in the United States before the cold war, many Iranians received an American education from Presbyterian missionaries. Harrison Gray Otis and Eli Smith arrived in Iran in 1830 to determine if the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions should open a post there. They concluded it should, and in 1835 five missionaries began work in Iran’s northwest. While the greatest legacy of the missionary presence in the Middle East is the American University of Beirut, the Iranian equivalent was Alborz College. Founded in 1873 as a primary school for Armenian and Jewish boys, it became a college in 1925 that enrolled young women and men and educated Muslims alongside Christians and Jews. In large part because of the school’s staffing needs, the American proselytizers in Iran outnumbered those from all other countries combined by the 1880s when the United States and Iran established official diplomatic relations. The most influential and respected of the Presbyterian missionaries was Samuel Martin Jordan, a Pennsylvanian and alumnus of Lafayette College who arrived in the country in 1898. Jordan strengthened the relationship between his alma mater and Alborz College, and by the 1920s Lafayette considered the school its special interest abroad. Until its nationalization in 1940, Alborz College marked the first attempt by Americans to win the hearts and minds of young Iranians.¹⁷

International Students in the United States

Part and parcel of the rise of American globalism was the push from American universities to, for the first time, enroll a sizable number of international students. China’s first hundred exited the United States as nativist sentiment reached a fevered pitch in the 1880s, but a new generation of Chinese students returned in the early twentieth century as part of the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program.¹⁸ At the same time, Filipino students migrated to their colonial metropole as part of the pensionado program.¹⁹ While education was an instrument of state power as the United States burst onto the world stage in the early twentieth century, the educators and philanthropists who founded the Committee on Friendly Relations among Foreign Students, the Institute of International Education, and the International House Movement considered the exchange of people part of an internationalist project.²⁰ Yet the nationalist fervor that smoldered during the global depression of the 1930s meant that international education was once again frankly envisaged as an instrument of official policy.²¹ In 1936 U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull traveled to Buenos Aires to announce the creation of a government-funded scholarship program, directed by the new Office of Inter-American Relations, designed to stave off fascism in the Western Hemisphere. Two years later, the Department of State established the Division for Cultural Relations, which presaged the further integration of education into the national security state.²²

For American strategists, attracting students to the United States from all corners of the world was a cold war imperative. U.S. officials worried that, as communism superseded the fascist threat, the Soviets were beating the United States to the punch in the educational sphere. George Kennan, the architect of the strategy of containment, expressed concern in his Long Telegram of February 1946 that the Soviet Union schemed to infiltrate international youth organizations.²³ As the devaluation of European currencies cut in half the number of students capable of seeking respite from the war-torn continent during the immediate postwar years, many youths enrolled in tuition-free, sovietized universities in Eastern Europe.²⁴ To counter Soviet maneuvers, President Harry Truman worked to find more opportunities for foreign students to study in our schools and universities so that they might learn here the skills and techniques needed in their own countries.… [and] see at first hand the rights and duties of citizens in our land of democratic institutions.²⁵ To stabilize Europe, the Truman administration unveiled the Marshall Plan for its economic reconstruction and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for its military protection. The administration also piloted cultural and informational programs to sell the American way to global publics.²⁶ To those ends, Truman allocated money from the sale of surplus war material to globalize American education when he signed the Fulbright Act into law in 1946. Two years later, the Smith-Mundt Act bolstered the Fulbright Program by authorizing two-way exchanges financed by congressionally appropriated dollars, not from the sale of war junk.²⁷ Iran signed a Fulbright agreement with the United States on September 1, 1949; it was the first Middle Eastern nation to do so and its impact was profound.²⁸ Commenting on the relationship between economic aid and international education, one Iranian professor stated, The United States has provided two great things for the world: the Marshall Plan and the Fulbright Program.²⁹

Modernization and International Education

While the Marshall Plan was the first U.S.-directed aid effort overseas and the Fulbright Program the gold standard for educational exchange, academics linked development and education within the framework of modernization theory. A theory of social, cultural, political, and economic change over time, modernization was a product of the cold war academy. During the superpower conflict, the United States sought an ideology to match its material wealth and power.³⁰ Walt Whitman Rostow, an economist, modernization theorist, and presidential adviser during the 1960s, outlined a non-communist manifesto to blunt the appeal of Marxist-Leninist doctrines as the race for influence in the third world began. Like Marxist-Leninists, Rostow argued that all nations passed through stages of development as part of the larger process of modernization. But Rostow saw a different end point, insisting that traditional societies were destined to reach an American-style of modernity. Rostow and other theorists such as Daniel Lerner bolstered, then, a much older liberal teleology with the authority of social science. The telos they envisioned for third world nations was, on paper, defined by meritocracy, technical efficiency, mass production and consumption, mobility and urbanization, and democratic governance.³¹ In particular cases such as Iran’s, however, policymakers slighted democratic governance because of security and economic interests.³² More generally, modernization theory was deeply flawed because it erroneously assumed a universal and transferable American way of life. Nonetheless, it was the dominant global paradigm at midcentury, and it was a theory that required educated global elites to implement. As David Menashri, the leading scholar of Iranian education, writes, a consensus existed during the first two postwar decades that education is the key that unlocks the door to modernization.³³

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 erased the final traces of that midcentury consensus, but the early twenty-first century saw scholars historicize modernization theory and argue for its centrality in the history of U.S. foreign relations.³⁴ In the modernization literature, the shah’s Iran is but one example of many to which authors briefly point to demonstrate that U.S. policymakers, particularly during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, erred in waging cold war by employing modernization as a means to guide the processes of revolutionary change that unfolded in the postcolonial world.³⁵ While scholars of Iran, most notably Fred Halliday and Ali Mirsepassi, provide comprehensive treatments of the Pahlavi state’s modernization project, American historians have been slow to analyze the relationship between that project and the United States. The centrality of international education to the successes and failures of the shah’s modernization program is also conspicuously absent from the literature.³⁶ Nevertheless, international education was the staple ingredient to Iranian modernization because of the long-term educational connections between Iran and the West, various push and pull factors that made the United States the preferred destination for Iranian students during the cold war, and the worldviews of postwar American internationalists and Iranian leaders.

During the cold war, the volume of Iranian student migration increased rapidly and the United States became the largest host country for Iranian students abroad. One push factor that drove Iranian students overseas related to the structural limitations of Iran’s system of higher education. While the shah opened five new schools between 1949 and 1955, Iran’s population continued to outpace seats available at the nation’s universities.³⁷ There were also pull factors that made American universities appealing to young Iranians. The United States had a wealth of technical knowledge to share with the world, and Truman’s Point Four Program and later efforts by the U.S. Agency for International Development signaled America’s commitment to sharing that knowledge. Overseas Consultants, Inc., one of the most influential of the shah’s American advisers, recognized as much when it reported that overseas training was highly desirable because it "assures the latest