TEHRAN — The end of a 32-year teaching career came abruptly for Ahmad Saiee, a professor of international relations at Tehran University.
"It was a month ago one morning at the university, and I was walking back to my office from a class when I heard a group of students demonstrating outside the department and chanting my name, among others," he said. "When I went closer, I heard they were calling for my reinstatement."
Saiee, 68, had picked up his mail from his pigeonhole earlier in the day, but had not opened it. When he rushed back to his office, he found the letter from the personnel department that told him what the students already knew.
"The letter said I had been given 'the honor of retirement,' " Saiee said at his home Saturday, the first day of the workweek in Iran.
Saiee is one of more than 40 professors at Tehran University who last week unexpectedly began their mandatory retirements.
The summary retirements have raised fears of another purge by Islamic hard-liners, this time aimed at reformists who promote the idea that Islam and democracy are compatible. The government contends that the time has come for the long-serving academics to leave their posts.
Professors served with retirement notices include some of the top lecturers at the nation's elite university, such as the dean of the law and international relations school, Hassan Ali Doroudian. Dozens more at other universities also have been given their notices.
All of them were older than 60 or had served for at least three decades. Most have declined to comment on the retirements; others could not be reached.
The retirements led to several days of protests by students who feared that the loss of so many professors in one swoop was the beginning of politically motivated purges at Iran's universities.
"We believe the forced retirements are part of a political move by the government to remove independent-minded lecturers and replace them with those they can lean on," said Vahid Abedini of the university's Islamic Student Assn.
Universities in Iran long have been regarded by many here as the political conscience of the nation. And since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, they have been the scene of political upheavals. Under the general banner of the "Cultural Revolution," the leaders of the uprising sought to impose hard-line Islamist values on the nation's universities and rid them of what they saw as secular and Western influences.
