As thousands are killed in Iran, MIT remains silent
MIT owes its Iranian students more than silence
I want to tell you about two universities.
At Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, students returned to campus this week for the first time since January's massacres. They chanted over the names of the dead. At K. N. Toosi University, students trampled an image of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, an act that carries a prison sentence, possibly death. At the University of Tehran, students issued a statement: "We did not give our lives to compromise, nor to praise a murderous leader." Security forces attacked them. By Monday, students at more than a dozen universities across Tehran, Mashhad, and Isfahan had joined them. They knew what would happen. They went anyway.
At MIT, where Iranian students are part of our community, the administration has not said a word.
I am Iranian. I have family in Iran. For weeks in January, I could not reach them. I am not the only one. Some Iranian students at MIT still have not been able to confirm that their families are alive. This is not an abstraction for us. This is Tuesday.
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Here is what has happened since December 28.
Nationwide protests erupted across Iran, the largest since the 1979 revolution. On January 8 and 9, under a near-total internet blackout, security forces opened fire on civilians. The Human Rights Activists News Agency has confirmed over 7,000 dead. Leaked internal government reports, cited by Time, The Guardian, and Iran International, place the figure above 30,000. Even Khamenei has acknowledged that “thousands” were killed. The United Nations Human Rights Council has called it the deadliest crackdown since the founding of the Islamic Republic. Amnesty International documented snipers on rooftops firing into crowds. On February 19, a senior regime official publicly confirmed that security forces delivered final shots to wounded protesters, an admission of extrajudicial execution from inside the system itself.
Tens of thousands have been arrested, including children. Many have been executed without due process. Human Rights Watch has documented mass enforced disappearances and coerced confessions broadcast on state television. Families across the country are now holding chehelom, the 40-day mourning tradition, and even these ceremonies are becoming sites of resistance: people dancing at funerals in defiance, chanting from rooftops. This week, universities reopened, and students in Iran are protesting again. These protests are happening at more than a dozen campuses across the country. These protests are happening under the shadow of a possible American military strike. These protests are happening under threat of arrest, expulsion, or worse. They are doing this knowing that their parents could be the ones mournfully dancing at their graves the day after.
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I bring up the students in Iran not to draw a false equivalence. No one at MIT faces the risks those students face. That is exactly the point. We have every freedom to speak, and we have used none of it.
Nearly a million Iranians in diaspora took to the streets on February 14. NYU students held a vigil on the steps of the New York Public Library. Northeastern, blocks from here, held a solidarity rally in January. The Graduate Employees' Organization at UIUC issued a statement. The European Parliament, the UN Human Rights Council, Amnesty International, governments across the world, all have spoken.
MIT has not.
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Institutions cannot respond to every crisis. I understand that, and this is not a demand that MIT take a foreign policy position. But when members of your own community cannot reach their families for weeks, when students in your hallways are grieving because they do not know if their loved ones are alive, that is not a foreign policy question. That is a question of whether you see the people in your own house. And even for those who have reached their families: the images coming out of Iran, bodies in hospital corridors, mass graves, children shot in the streets, are not things you see and recover from. The dead are not strangers to us. They are our people.
There are students at MIT who have been carrying this for almost two months, largely alone. Some sit next to you in lecture. Some TA your classes. They are doing it without any institutional acknowledgment that what they are going through is real.
Silence, in a case like this, is not neutrality. It is a decision.
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What I am asking for is small relative to what is happening. A public statement from MIT acknowledging the scale of violence in Iran and its impact on our community. Direct support resources, counseling, academic flexibility, for students navigating weeks of severed family contact. This is not geopolitical commentary. This is what institutions do when their people are hurting.
And to the rest of the MIT community: if you know Iranian students, check in with them. If solidarity events happen on campus, show up. You do not need to understand the full politics of Iran to recognize that your classmate might be suffering.
Students in Iran are risking everything to stand up this week. We are being asked to do so much less.
The author has been granted anonymity due to safety concerns. The Tech has independently verified the identity of the author.