'Aida', a woman in her late 20s, is feeling stressed rather than excited about returning to university.

A postgraduate student from Iran, she is among more than 800,000 international students in Australia preparing for a new academic year.

Like many, Aida — whose name has been changed for safety reasons — is juggling academic studies with earning an income.

She also has other things weighing on her mind. For one, she's distressed by a violent crackdown on protesters in her homeland.

"I am feeling very stressed and at the same time I have to work and study. And it is really hard," she said.

Restricted phone and internet access over recent weeks has also triggered her worst fears.

"We could not message our loved ones, our families, and we did not know if they were alive or not," she said.

Aida is on a scholarship and finishing a PhD in science. She's also working an office job to buy food and pay rent at a sharehouse.

While managing this busy schedule, her worries about friends and colleagues in Iran are ever-present.

"Students in Iran have lost their friends or do not know where their friends are, whether they are killed or whether they are arrested," she said.

"And many students inside Iran are still fighting. Iranian students outside of Iran are trying our best to be their voice," she said.

In recent days, as classes resume in Iran, students have protested at multiple universities over those killed in the recent round of protests, some chanting "a student may die, but will not accept humiliation".

The Independent Students' Association of Beheshti University in Iran has also reported that students at more than 30 universities and colleges have boycotted exams.

The Iranian government has released the names of 3,000 people killed during the recent protests. However, United States-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) says it has verified 6,872 deaths and is investigating more than 11,000 other cases. It reports 214 security forces were among those killed.

Tens of thousands of protesters are also detained in Iran's prisons. For some Iranian students, these concerns are affecting their health and wellbeing.

"It has been more than 20 days that I still could not sleep," Aida said.

"I see notifications on my phone that someone is killed, someone is arrested. And it is stressful, very stressful for me.

"This is a difficult time for Iranian students in Australia, because many of us have no family here," she said.

"We came to continue our studies, to have a better life, to follow our dreams. But we are on our own, we have no one."

Aida is from Iran's capital, Tehran, and has not visited her homeland since 2025. She took part in the Woman, Life, Freedom protest movement in 2022 and said recent events have revived painful memories.

"It brings back my trauma," she said. "I am even scared of fireworks because [the noise] reminds me of bullets that I heard on the streets in Iran.

"I know that in Australia and we are safe, but this is still really hard for me."

Protests erupted in Iran in late December 2025. They were triggered partly by economic woes but soon expanded into a wider expression of anti-regime activism.

Iran's rial currency lost nearly half its value against the US dollar last year, with inflation reaching 42.5 per cent in December.

Unrest has repeatedly flared in recent years, amid deteriorating economic conditions, caused in part by international economic sanctions, and threats of conflict with Israel, realised during 12 days of open fighting in June 2025.

Parisa Glass is a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales who fled Iran as a teenager.

She knows many Iranian students who are suffering emotionally and financially, especially those dependent on family funds for tuition and living costs.

"Many parents sell everything they have to send their children abroad to get tertiary education, because education it is extremely important to families in Iran," Glass said.

"But with the currency collapsing and the broader Iranian economy in chaos, their money doesn't go far at all."

With the academic year about to begin, Glass fears ongoing stress will cause Iranian students' results to suffer.

"They are already experiencing emotional trauma and financial difficulties are putting students under even more stress," she said.

"Many are working multiple jobs. And again, that impacts their ability to perform academically."

Glass is a follower of the Baháʼí Faith whose adherents are persecuted in Iran. She tries to help students however she can.

"I personally support at least one student in Australia who is struggling financially," she said.

"I help them to find work as well as mentoring them to navigate the job market in Australia, so they can earn a living."

Limited internet access in Iran this year has also impacted those intending to study abroad, academics say.

Elli Irannezhad is a member of the International Community of Iranian Academics.

"The digital blackout impacted many prospective international students who could not get access to the internet to lodge their applications and again, because of financial issues, they could not afford to pay tuition or application fees, for visas or flights," she said.

Australia has around 85,000 Iranian-born residents and more than 3,000 Iranian students are enrolled here in tertiary studies.

Irannezhad is among those appealing to Australian universities to show leniency.

"Specifically, universities could extend some deadlines such as for admissions, provide financial support for students by waiving some fees, provide more flexibility for students' private health insurance.

"And universities could also offer free counselling services," she said.

Recent rallies across Australia have seen the diaspora join to grieve lives lost and show support for the thousands of detainees still at risk in Iran's prisons. And to call for a better future.

"My hope is for a democratic country with freedom of expression and that one day all Iranians can lead normal lives like they do in many other countries. That's my ultimate hope," Irannezhad said.

However, for many Iranian students like Aida, watching events in her homeland from afar is a private anguish.

"We are all ashamed that we cannot do anything for our loved ones in Iran," she said.

"I have so many loved ones in Tehran, and not only in Tehran but in every part of my country. They are all my loved ones.

"We wait every moment for news from Iran, to see if our loved ones are still alive or not."

Having witnessed widespread death and destruction during brutal regime crackdown, students struggling to adjust describe feeling abandoned by their universities

When protests flared across Iran in late December, the impact on universities was immediate.

“It was, quite literally, house arrest: no internet, no classes, no television,” said one student in the country at the time.

University dormitories were evacuated and campuses shut as protests spread. Teaching and laboratory work were suspended and access to information quickly disappeared.

The demonstrations, which began over economic grievances and quickly spread across the country, were some of the largest to hit Iran in recent years and fuelled real hopes of change.

But, almost as quickly as they started, they were met with a bloody crackdown that has left thousands of people dead.

Now students and scholars still in Iran fear they are being forgotten about as international attention shifts elsewhere, but the repercussions of what happened are still being keenly felt.

“Once the internet came back, we were overwhelmed with news of the deaths of our loved ones and friends,” one engineering student at a top university in Iran said. “We have no energy left to study. We are exhausted and hopeless.”

“If you watched a 15-year-old girl die in front of you, a live bullet passing through her throat, would you have the strength to study afterward?” the student said. “Now imagine not one child like this, but hundreds.”

Other students have described how they were caught up in the violence as it unfolded.

A law student currently based in the UK, who was in Iran when protests escalated, said there were initially optimistic scenes on the streets. “The crowd I saw on the night of 8 January was one of the biggest I’ve seen in my life on the streets in Iran,” she said. “This time, every single city was crowded and many people came out.”

Later that evening, police moved in. “They started shooting. They used tear gas.” The student suffered a severe asthma attack and was helped by a stranger who took her to a nearby pharmacy. “Outside was a literal war zone,” she said. “Police forces were coming on their motorcycles and shooting people.”

Public transport shut early and, with no way home, she spent the night sheltering in a stranger’s house. “They [the security forces] did all of that overnight,” she said. “And in the morning everything was normal, like nothing had happened.” But the following night, protests were smaller. “They had killed so many people,” she said.

The students say universities have offered little recognition of what has happened, or of its toll. “The principals of the universities are really close to the system,” the law student said. “If they say something to sympathise with the students, they’ll say that all these killings were because of terrorist attacks from outside, not by the police forces.”

She said there had been no counselling or welfare support. “There are no options for therapy or anything like that,” she said. “Students are depressed.” Student halls, she added, were placed under curfew. “After 5pm, no one can leave,” she said. “They are literally stuck.”

Encieh Erfani, an academic and co-founder of the International Community of Iranian Academics, said dissent within universities is tightly limited as “it is impossible to become a university president without clear political loyalty to the regime and active compliance with its directives”. “Faculty members who pass these multiple filters while remaining genuinely opposed to the regime are few and structurally silenced. Even where dissenting academics are numerically significant, their financial dependence on the state and exposure to punitive measures compel silence during periods of crisis. This was evident during the current uprising, when faculty support was minimal or absent.”

Iranian students based abroad had a different experience. Maryam and Mohammad, both PhD students in Australia, said they spent weeks receiving only fragmented updates from home during the extended internet shutdowns.

They said many of those killed or injured were students who had already set their sights on universities overseas including in Australia.  

One case Mohammad recounted involved a 23-year-old who had applied to the Australian National University but died after being shot.

Australia has a relatively large Iranian-born population, numbering around 85,000 residents at the most recent census, and is one of the main destinations for Iranian students seeking to study abroad.

Another student affected was a 28-year-old biotechnology graduate, Negin, who had asked about applying to Australian universities months earlier. “She went outside with her father,” Mohammad said. “She was just protesting and she got shot.” Maryam said Negin’s family was later warned not to speak publicly. “They threatened them,” she said. “Most of them cannot even find the dead bodies of their loved ones.”

They also described a friend, Imam, who had received a scholarship to an Australian university but whose enrolment was delayed and later cancelled after years of visa problems. “He got injured with a pellet gun into the face,” Mohammad said.

Other students who survived the protests and were hoping to study abroad are now stuck in limbo. Many have not even been able to sit their exams yet, let alone prepare official documents. “With Google effectively filtered and the country resembling North Korea, email services stopped functioning,” the law student said. “Anyone with interviews scheduled or awaiting application results has reached a complete dead end.”

For her, a student who has made it abroad, universities across the world could be doing more.

She said she had expected more acknowledgement from her own top university in the UK. “They haven’t sent me any email about the situation in Iran,” she said. “Even though they know I’m an Iranian student.” She said the silence was painful. “I expected more from them,” she said. “I expected them to hold events to raise awareness or ask about our experiences.” She added that the lack of response mirrored a wider uninterest after the initial attention. “The world remains silent,” she said.

Iranian researchers are in a difficult situation. Those in Iran face low wages, high inflation, sociopolitical instability, resource mismanagement, oppression by the authorities and long-standing international sanctions. High prices hinder conference attendance, as do difficulties obtaining visas. Unstable Internet connections, frequent power outages and lack of access to scholarly sources jeopardize collaborations. Scholars also have to contend with isolation, and sometimes biases, from the international community. And for those who work abroad, travelling to and from Iran is risky, even with visas and double citizenship.

Recent tensions have further exacerbated the situation. Scientists, in shock and distress, have condemned violence against civilians. Research requires focus, concentration and a calm state of mind — rare commodities in these times.

The international research community can support Iranian colleagues: send a message, show them that they are not forgotten. If your institutional policies allow it, try to work with researchers in Iran. International collaborations will help to build capacity there, strengthening civil society and enabling it to tackle systemic challenges.

There is no need to be a politician to engage in science diplomacy. Do not wait for big initiatives to build bridges. At this moment, Iranian researchers can benefit from kind gestures. Show solidarity.

Nature 650, 266 (2026)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00342-0

Iran’s current wave of protests continues to spread across the country, as the United States weighs military intervention. Meanwhile, many Iranian people continue to struggle to pay for basic necessities amid a collapsing currency.

The anti-government demonstrations began in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, one of the largest and oldest covered markets in the world, in December 2025. From there, they quickly reached Iran’s university campuses.

The government’s response was swift and familiar: Authorities ordered universities to move classes online, citing weather concerns. When students continued organizing, the regime closed universities entirely.

I am an Iranian-American who has studied Iranian social movements for more than 25 years. As an educator, I have also led American universities, while maintaining ties to Iranian academic institutions.

I also witnessed firsthand the systematic assault on academic freedom during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from 2005 through 2013.

Iran’s universities tell the story of the nation itself: a story of persistent hope confronting relentless repression, and of intellectual life refusing to be extinguished even under extraordinary pressure.

Iranian universities have long been places of political reform and imagination – and where the Islamic Republic’s authoritarian impulses collide with people’s demands for freedom.

The heartbeat of reform

Iran has 316 accredited universities across the country, including the University of Tehran and Islamic Azad University.

Iranian universities have been hubs of political activity and protest since at least the mid-1900s.

Student-led protest movements emerged forcefully in the 1940s following the abdication of Reza Shah, an Iranian military officer who led Iran as its shah, or monarch, from 1925 to 1941.

These groups gained momentum during the oil nationalization movement led by the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Students supported Mossadegh’s promises of a democratic and free Iran, where the benefits of resources – like oil – would be reaped by Iranians first, before extending to the rest of the world.

The United States led a CIA-backed military coup that overthrew Mossadegh and reinstated Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as shah of Iran in 1953.

College campuses again became critical spaces for political consciousness and opposition.

A long-established pattern

This pattern continued for decades. Universities were central to the 1979 revolution, with students joining clerics, leftists and nationalists in overthrowing the monarchy.

Yet once consolidated, the Islamic Republic quickly turned against the institutions that had helped make the revolution possible.

The 1980s and 1990s saw widespread purges of faculty, with the imprisonment of professors in such numbers that the notorious Evin Prison came to be grimly nicknamed “Evin University.”

Academic life was tightly policed, books were routinely banned, and government surveillance became routine. As Azar Nafisi later documented in the 2003 book “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” intellectual engagement often survived only through clandestine reading groups and private gatherings.

Yet repression never succeeded in erasing student activism. When formal organizing became impossible, it moved underground. When campuses were locked down, ideas continued to circulate.

Thaw, reversal and academic repression

The election of Mohammad Khatami in 1997 briefly altered this trajectory of academic repression.

Khatami ran for office as a reformist candidate with strong support from young people. As president, he presided over a limited thaw in academic life. Universities reopened slightly as spaces for debate and research.

I conducted fieldwork on the youth movement and sexual revolution in Iran beginning in 1999 – research that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier.

But the opening proved fragile. Ahmadinejad’s rise to power in 2005 marked a return to aggressive repression. Universities were again treated as ideological threats. Some faculty members were arrested or dismissed, student organizations were dismantled, and coursework and readings were heavily censored.

The irony was stark. By the mid-2000s, Iran had one of the highest literacy rates and highest proportions of college graduates per capita in the region.

Yet the government began restricting which majors women could study and which subjects could be taught. Entire fields, including engineering, education and counseling, were deemed suspect. Professors who resisted faced harassment and dismissal. Student protests were met with force and detention.

Despite this, youth-led mobilization persisted. Every major protest cycle over the past two decades – including the 1999 student uprising – has been driven by young people, many of them university students.

Universities in the current uprising

Recent Iranian university closures underscore the regime’s likely fears of resistance – not simply because of what is taught in classrooms, since curricula can be controlled – but also because of the power that young people can gain when they physically gather in shared spaces.

Dormitories, libraries and cafeterias are where political awareness coalesces, where individual grievances become collective demands, and where dissent acquires momentum.

Today, by systematically alienating young people through economic mismanagement, social repression and the erosion of academic freedom, the government has created its most formidable opposition: young protesters. Analysts have increasingly identified this pattern as one of the regime’s central strategic failures.

Universities are a lens into Iran

What happens inside Iran’s universities today is not a side story – it is one of the clearest indicators of where the country may be headed.

The freedom to teach, read, question and debate mirrors the freedom Iranian citizens seek in public life more broadly. Just as women have pushed back against state control of their bodies one millimeter at a time, universities have pushed back against intellectual confinement one page at a time – expanding the boundaries of permissible thought even under threat of punishment.

For decades, Iranian students and professors have demonstrated extraordinary courage in sustaining these small but vital acts of defiance. They have kept alive what Iranians call “koorsoo”: a small, stubborn flame of hope that endures even in darkness.

History suggests that societies which wage war on their intellectual institutions ultimately lose more than control – they lose legitimacy. Iran’s universities have long been the heartbeat of reform. Today, that heartbeat is growing louder – and it may once again shape the course of the nation’s history.

ISLAMABAD, Jan 15 (Reuters) - Pakistani students returning from Iran on Thursday said they heard gunshots and stories of rioting and violence while being confined to campus and not allowed out of their dormitories in the evening.

Iran's leadership is trying to quell the worst domestic unrest since its 1979 revolution, with a rights group putting the death toll over 2,600.

As the protests swell, Tehran is seeking to deter U.S. President Donald Trump's repeated threats to intervene on behalf of anti-government protesters. 

"During nighttime, we would sit inside and we would hear gunshots," Shahanshah Abbas, a fourth-year student at Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, said at the Islamabad airport.

"The situation down there is that riots have been happening everywhere. People are dying. Force is being used."

Abbas said students at the university were not allowed to leave campus and told to stay in their dormitories after 4 p.m.

"There was nothing happening on campus," Abbas said, but in his interactions with Iranians, he heard stories of violence and chaos.

"The surrounding areas, like banks, mosques, they were damaged, set on fire ... so things were really bad."

Trump has repeatedly threatened to intervene in support of protesters in Iran but adopted a wait-and-see posture on Thursday after protests appeared to have abated. Information flows have been hampered by an internet blackout for a week.

"We were not allowed to go out of the university," said Arslan Haider, a student in his final year. "The riots would mostly start later in the day."

Haider said he was unable to contact his family due to the blackout but "now that they opened international calls, the students are getting back because their parents were concerned".

A Pakistani diplomat in Tehran said the embassy was getting calls from many of the 3,500 students in Iran to send messages to their families back home.

"Since they don't have internet connections to make WhatsApp and other social network calls, what they do is they contact the embassy from local phone numbers and tell us to inform their families."

Rimsha Akbar, who was in the middle of her final year exams at Isfahan, said international students were kept safe.

"Iranians would tell us if we are talking on Snapchat or if we were riding in a cab ... that shelling had happened, tear gas had happened, and that a lot of people were killed."

An Iranian student has been shot dead during anti-government demonstrations in Tehran, as universities continue to face disruption amid an ever more restrictive regime response to the protests.

Rubina Aminian, who studied textile and fashion design at Shariati College in the capital, was killed on 8 January after leaving her campus to join protests, according to the Norway-based organisation Iran Human Rights. Sources close to the 23-year-old’s family told the group that she was shot in the head at close range.

Aminian’s relatives travelled from their home in Kermanshah province to Tehran to identify her body, which was among scores of others. 

According to Iran Human Rights, they were confronted with numerous corpses of young protesters before finally locating her.

“It wasn’t just my daughter; I saw hundreds of bodies with my own eyes,” Aminian’smother told the group.

After retrieving her body, the family returned home but found their house surrounded by intelligence forces and were reportedly barred from holding a funeral there. They were ultimately forced to bury her beside a road between the city of Kermanshah and nearby Kamyaran.

Aminian was described as a vibrant young woman who had been passionate about her studies and her future.

Her death came amid one of the most sustained periods of dissent the Islamic Republic has faced in years. 

The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency estimates that at least 538 people have been killed in the unrest and more than 10,600 arrested, although restrictions on communication make exact figures difficult to confirm.

In recent weeks, several Iranian universities have suspended in-person teaching and moved examinations online as authorities seek to limit campus gatherings.

During earlier protest waves, closures and remote learning measures were used to disperse student demonstrations and curtail assemblies. 

Scholars have warned that these responses risk further disrupting academic life and could have lasting consequences for teaching, research and campus autonomy.

Nasim Basiri, an Iranian scholar who is currently a visiting assistant professor at the University of Connecticut, told Times Higher Education: “Higher education has become both a battleground and a barometer of social change at the moment, where academic freedom, gender equity and political expression are actively contested.

“The ongoing repression in universities undermines not only immediate student welfare but also long-term intellectual and social progress, especially for women scholars and students.”

Student activism has also drawn the attention of security forces.  

Rights groups have reported arrests and detentions of students at demonstrations in Tehran and other cities, highlighting the risks faced by young people who take part.

The protests began in late December amid economic grievances and calls for political change. The movement has since expanded into a broader challenge to the regime’s authority.

Iranian authorities have responded with force, including using live ammunition and mass arrests, as well as imposing internet outages and communication restrictions.