Monday, Apr. 21, 1975

Pipeline from Iran

William McGill, president of Columbia University, was eating breakfast in the Royal Tehran Hilton recently when a familiar figure walked by. McGill and his friend, the president of a California university, looked at each other and grinned. "What are you doing here?" asked McGill. "When did you start working this territory?" replied the Californian.

U.S. educators have been stumbling over each other in Iran during the past year as word spreads that the petrodollar-rich country badly needs academic expertise--and is willing to pay dearly for it. Faced with dwindling income from endowments, foundations and the Federal Government, college administrators from Harvard to the University of Southern California have headed for the Middle East to offer Iranians training and advice in everything from the latest audio-visual techniques to the peaceful uses of atomic energy.

Last month Georgetown University signed what is probably the largest deal so far with Iran--an $11.5 million, five-year agreement to help Ferdowsi University in the holy city of Mashhad create, among other things, schools of engineering, agriculture and economics. In other recently signed contracts with U.S. colleges, Iran awarded:

$1.8 million to the Wentworth Institute, a two-year engineering school in Boston, to set up a vocational school in Shiraz.

$1.3 million to M.I.T. to train up to 54 Iranian graduate students in nuclear engineering.

$1 million to George Washington University, which is developing graduate programs in management.

$1 million to U.S.C. for an endowed chair in petroleum engineering.

$970,000 to Stanford to plan satellite-based rural telephone and educational television systems.

$400,000 to Harvard to plan a graduate-level research university.

$400,000 to Princeton for the Pahlavi Endowment for Iranian Studies.

$361,250 to Columbia to organize two consortiums. In one, Cornell and Harvard will jointly plan an international medical complex; the other, including the universities of Michigan, Chicago, West Virginia and Maryland, is to plan a school of social welfare.

The influx of oil money has aroused suspicion and alarm on U.S. campuses. At M.I.T., the student paper denounced the administration for "selling M.I.T." and predicted that the Iranian nuclear-engineering students would end up making "bombs for the Shah." At Stanford, two dozen Iranian students joined radical American students and marched around the campus with brown paper bags over then-heads--to avoid identification, they said, by the Shah's spies. Their complaint: Stanford's television and telephone hookups would extend the influence of a "repressive regime."

Although the University of California does not yet even have any contracts with Iran, the Daily Californian, the student paper, protested: "That the University of California would even consider dealing with such an oppressive, totalitarian regime is an affront to the ideals of a free university." U.C. Vice President Durward Long disagrees. Says he: "We consider assisting developing nations to improve their educational capacities in the interest of their people."

University administrators have not been disheartened by opposition at home. In fact, they are pursuing the petrodollar with a vigor that has left some Iranians confused. Says Homer Higbee, an assistant dean at Michigan State, which has negotiated two contracts for $440,000 with the Iranians: "They don't know who is legitimate and who is not."

The academic scramble for Middle East riches has extended beyond Iran. Indiana University is working out the details of a $1 million agreement to train as many as 300 Saudi Arabian teachers in audio-visual techniques, while Stanford Administrator Jon Cosovich says that he too is exploring possibilities there. Admits Cosovich, with understated candor: "There is a correlation between their wealth and our interest."

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