Fourteen Critiques by Mostafa Malekian on the Current State of Universities

Universities are expected to serve three groups: “society,” “administrators and officials,” and “professors and students.” If a university cannot improve conditions in these three areas, it has strayed from its function. I believe 14 factors have distanced the university in Iran from its function:

1- Our universities were established on the assumption of training specialists capable of undertaking jobs and professions. This is while the university was not created solely to train jobholders; more importantly, it was created for the “cultivation of culture.” But unfortunately, we have no education in erudition in our universities.

2- Confining ourselves to professional and vocational training in universities is another problem. This is while, alongside specialization, “ethics” and the “art of living” must also be taught to students, and one cannot rely solely on specialization.

3- The lack of connection between what is taught in universities and the real needs of society is another problem of the university. This does not mean that we should ask institutions and ministries how many personnel they need and at what quality, and train students according to their requests; rather, we must ask what kind of human beings society itself needs. You cannot say which ministry needs intellectuals and reformers, but society needs an intellectual and a social reformer.

4- Training the devout and committed instead of the competent is another issue of our universities. Instead of hiring experts, we hire loyalists. This is while society, in order to be well-administered, needs the competent, not the loyal.

5- The university’s work not proceeding according to the theory of the “unconcealment of truth” is another problem in universities. Epistemologically, the university believes in the unconcealment of truth, whereby truth must be obtained bit by bit through a difficult and lengthy process. From this perspective, ideological systems can never have good universities because they believe the truth belongs to them.

6- The next problem is having totems and taboos; that is, matters so sacred they cannot be approached, and matters so forbidden they cannot be approached. Having totems and taboos destroys the university. The university is a university only when it has no totems or taboos. One of the reasons for the West’s development is empiricism, but empiricism not in the sense opposed to rationalism; empiricism in the sense that before encountering a phenomenon, we say nothing positive or negative about it, so we can see what conclusion our encounter with that matter leads us to.

7- Another problem is totems and taboos within the university department itself, where some professors do not welcome new subjects and projects. Our departments resemble “museums of science” more than “laboratories of science.” Because the professors themselves have totems and taboos and do not allow certain new subjects to enter the university, since they fall outside their area of expertise and interest.

8- Another problem of our universities is that they do not give students insight into the exchange between sciences and their boundaries with other sciences. The result of this is the derisive view of professors and students toward other academic disciplines, because they do not know how much they are indebted to those sciences; another issue is not recognizing the boundaries of sciences, the result of which is a failure to observe methodology. I believe we face methodological chaos and confusion in our research.

9- Students’ reliance on memory instead of “understanding” is another problem of our academy.

10- When we rely on memory instead of “understanding,” we resort to imitation instead of thinking.

11- If a professor is strong in research, it does not necessarily mean they are also strong in teaching. From the fact that the university must combine teaching and research, it does not follow that every individual at the university who is a good researcher will necessarily be a good educator.

12- Viewing work as a job rather than a profession is another of our problems in the university. If we look at work from the perspective of personal benefit, we have considered it a job, but if we see it as a social function, we have viewed it as a "profession." Some of our professors view their work as a job. There is a great difference between a professor who has come to give what they have to the university and a professor who has come to take what they do not have from the university.

13- The strange indifference of our universities to the humanities is one of our most fundamental problems. In a university where the humanities are weak, not only does the university become weak, but the entire society becomes weak.

14- Another problem of our universities is that the curricula provided by the Ministry of Science are not expert-based and cause our students to have a caricatured image of their discipline.

? The present text is an edited and summarized version by the "Iran" newspaper of a speech by Mostafa Malekian, delivered on January 2nd at the opening of the Social Studies of Science, Technology, and Innovation Roundtable at the National Research Institute for Science Policy.