No Place To Go

About the only sleep that Edward L. Keenan '57, professor of History, loses over his involvement with a planned graduate school in Iran is the night wasted each time he flies there. After Harvard agreed to advise Iran on the planning of an Iranian graduate school last year, the administrators and faculty involved wrote a report, took their expense money and severed ties with the project. However, Keenan, a member of the commission, decided to stay on as one of three American overseers--determined to exercise an advisory role in the institute's governance.

But Keenan's job is not that simple. Iran's leader, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, who came to power by a CIA-sponsored coup in 1953, runs the Middle Eastern nation as a virtual police state. With the aid of his CIA-trained SAVAK, or secret police, the Shah has jailed 100,000 political dissenters, according to Amnesty International estimates.

In Iran, Le Monde reports, prisons are being built faster than new school buildings. And inside those prisons, the SAVAK practices torture on students, teachers and others who disagree vocally with the Shah's repressive policies. As Nat Hentoff reported in the Village Voice last month, the SAVAK uses fairly standard methods of torture: "power batons used with special zeal in the genital area...the pulling of teeth by decidedly non-licensed practitioners...and the 'Hot Table,'" something pioneered by the Iranians which gradually toasts and ultimately burns the strapped-in prisoner. Iranian exiles report that SAVAK, estimated to be 70,000 strong, has at least two agents or informers in every classroom. And the police are known to monitor the whereabouts of every Iranian studying in the United States.

When Keenan, a specialist in modern Russian history, talks of his involvement, which includes making about four three-day weekend trips each year on his own, not Harvard's, time, he speaks in terms of a "calculus of morality." It's that calculus, the weighing of the work he is accomplishing in Iran versus a policy of non-involvement, that enables him to board the plane without hesitation.

"I'm not involved in politics," Keenan says at his desk in the Russian Research Center portion of 1737 Cambridge St. "I'm just trying to make the best university I can." Maybe it's because Keenan says he sees universities as inherently "good things" that he says he sees nothing wrong with being an overseer. Keenan admits that his work there is a "complicated thing, an individual matter." But he adds, "I don't think there is much of a question about the role of the university in the moral calculus of western society."

Keenan says he agrees with the Med School's decision last month to sever its ties with an elite medical center in Iran because, in his words, "it was a medical care facility for people who already have enough medical care." But he says the politics of the grad school, which will be composed of 40 per cent social and natural science courses and 20 per cent medical services, pose no such problems. And he doesn't seem too worried about preserving free speech within the class room. "No prudent person would attempt to predict how individuals will behave in a decade from now when the university will be operating in full capacity." It would be the height of folly to say how things will be in Iran, as it would have been to foresee what it would be like starting a school in India a few years ago, he says. "And if the university is like we want it to be in the 1980s then everybody will be better off."

The threat of the secret police on campus does not deter Keenan, who says he is not sure whether to believe all the reports of their role in classes. He says he has "no other information" than what he reads in the Village Voice, adding that he doesn't know anybody who does know more. Keenan doesn't doubt the existence of the secret police; rather, he applies his principle of moral calculus to them. "As someone who spends most of his waking hours dealing with a country with which a good deal more is known about the secret police, I would say that the university we are engaged in has a greater chance to succeed than it would in that country--mainly the Soviet Union--in which various individuals happen to collaborate and have cultural and intellectual relations."

Keenan says he spent two years in Leningrad University so he knows the limitations of education in an atmosphere where free speech is hampered. But he says, "Despite all that, it is better that Leningrad be open than closed."

Keenan says there has been no pressure on him to resign his overseeing commission. He adds, however, that friends of his in organizations like Amnesty International would prefer that no one work with Iran. He says that a boycott by himself "would be a hollow, ineffective and not necessarily morally brave option. Americans I think without being crusaders can bring moral pressure to bear in a way that maybe others won't be able to. But they will not be effective if they are simplistic." And, he adds, "If one were to accept Amnesty International's position for example, there is no place you can go except for a few countries in Africa and Asia."

For those who believe that educational involvement in Iran is morally wrong, Keenan asks, "Would you collaborate in an institution in the Soviet Union, Algeria, Surinam? Would you let someone die of typhus because somebody else in that country is doing something wrong? You have to decide if the university is a morally uplifting institution. And in my view it is."

Keenan concedes that there is a chance that the intellectual freedom that he wants at the school may be hampered. But he says he is convinced that conditions of free speech are going to be enormously better than they were in his years at Leningrad. "In my own judgement this institute will improve the life of many Iranians, maybe all Iranians. If it were appearing to me that my calculation about its ability to do so are mistaken, then I'll withdraw. And," he adds with a slight smile, "I wish I could find a university like this in the Soviet Union."