On June 6, 1974, Jerome Wiesner booked into room 1537 at the Royal Tehran Hilton in preparation for his audience with the Shah of Iran. The electrical engineer had just celebrated his 59th birthday. In his six decades, he’d been chief scientific adviser to JFK, a name on Richard Nixon’s list of political enemies, and was now the 13th president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
While his friends and family had mulled over what to gift him on his birthday, Wiesner was occupied by his own deliberations over what to gift the shah. “How about one of the crystals?” a colleague posited in a letter, referring to those grown aboard NASA’s first space station. “Two of them are said to be the most perfect crystals ever grown – because of the zero g environment, of course.”
The MIT professors in possession of the perfect crystals might not be willing to part with an entire specimen, he admitted. “But I should think you might be able to persuade them to donate at least a millimeter slice.” Convinced, Wiesner arranged for a sliver of the space gem to be mounted on a velvet cushion.
He was already in Tehran when an angry NASA official called MIT and mumbled about the upset at the Space Center. MIT was informed that “upper levels of NASA have ‘hit the ceiling.’” Turned out it wasn’t clear who actually owned the crystals, and Wiesner’s history as a thorn in NASA’s side didn’t help matters much.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi never received the perfect space crystal (gifted instead to President Gerald Ford a few months later), but Wiesner gave him something else at that meeting in Tehran that would end up being far more useful and far more polarizing.
In 1975, MIT agreed to train two cohorts of 27 Iranian nuclear scientists in a three-year graduate program that would provide them with the skills necessary to run the reactors in Iran’s fledgling nuclear industry. The students were handpicked by the shah’s new atomic energy chief and had all expenses paid. At MIT, the special program caused an uproar that eventually receded into history, packed into numbered boxes in the university’s archives.
That’s where I found them: the letters, speeches, reports from student journalists, transcripts from heated faculty meetings, notes from impassioned student activists, scribbled memos from secretaries — records of a debate that underscored a fundamental question: Who “deserves” technology? Now that the U.S. is at war with Iran over a nuclear program it helped to establish, perhaps there is something especially useful waiting for us in those MIT boxes, some insight provided by revisiting campus in that spring of 1975 and hearing anew the arguments presented by those burdened by a sense of consequence and conscience.
No one at MIT could have known what would happen in Iran four years after agreeing to help them set up their nuclear program. Well, they probably could have, and correspondence between faculty members — and especially from Iranian students — reveals that many did suspect Iran would implode.
In the 1970s, political dissidents, students, intellectuals and leftists in general made up the majority of Iran’s systematically tortured prison population. But the U.S. happened to like this particular despot. American journalists frequently applauded the shah’s rapid modernization plan as farsighted and American tycoons jockeyed for a piece of the pie. He was the biggest buyer of American military equipment at a time when more than half of his country’s population hovered dangerously close to the poverty line.
In a tumultuous 1973 interview with Oriana Fallaci — and as if reading from a Monty Python script — the shah vigorously stated: “Democracy? Freedom? What do these words mean? I don’t want any part of it, it’s all yours, you can keep it, don’t you see? Your wonderful democracy. You’ll see, in a few years, what your wonderful democracy leads to.”
But something more glittery crowded out foresight: Iran was on the right side of the 1973 oil crisis, and as a result Pahlavi was raking in what the rest of the world was shelling out. MIT, like much of U.S. higher education in that decade, made cuts left, right and center to stay afloat amid the Great Inflation, which was exacerbated by massive rises in the price of oil.
In 1974, MIT’s energy bill increased by 30%, while Iran’s oil revenues increased by nearly 300% to $20 billion (around $125 billion today). Wiesner hiked tuition by 8% two years in a row while the shah poured money into sending Iranians to study abroad. In short, Iran had the money to help MIT do what the strapped institution was struggling to do on its own.
Upon returning from Tehran, Wiesner wrote to the shah thanking him for the “honor and rare privilege” of speaking with him about his “great humane undertaking,” which now included finalized agreements for an exchange program between MIT and the Arya-Mehr University of Technology (AMUT). “We hope that this is just the beginning of a fruitful collaboration between M.I.T. and the scientists and engineers of Iran,” Wiesner signed off. “Respectfully yours.”
A month later, Wiesner wrote again, saying it had “occurred to me” that the shah and his “practical men” might benefit from a visit to MIT. “Some completely new and useful ideas of how M.I.T. could help Iran reach your own vigorous national goal should certainly come from such an assessment.”
He suggested the trip take place during the milder weather of late March or early April, to which the shah vaguely replied that a visit to MIT would give him “great pleasure,” “whenever I should have the opportunity of coming to the United States of America.”
Pahlavi came to the U.S. but denied himself the great pleasure of visiting Wiesner’s institute. Wiesner was encouraged to ask if the shah wouldn’t squeeze a “brief audience” into his packed Washington schedule, to no avail. Wiesner did, however, receive an invitation from the Iranian ambassador to a performance by the American Ballet Theatre at which the Pahlavis were to be present. “Called + said no” is written in blue ink in the margins.
It’s not clear how news got out that the engineering department had all but signed a contract with Iran, although Mike McNamee, then-editor-in-chief of MIT’s student newspaper, The Tech, is at least certain that the March 4 scoop came from Tech reporter Barb Moore, not from any handout from the administration, which faced criticism for its secrecy.
The secrecy may have partly resulted from a rather disjointed sequence of events that culminated in the surprise application of 45 Iranian students. The nuclear engineering department’s acting head, Kent Hansen, described the snowballing situation in a memorandum sent on Jan. 23, 1975, to Wiesner, the chancellor, and five other relevant deans and professors. In an urgent tone, he appealed for a decision to be made as soon as possible — the admission process was already underway, and none of MIT’s options were consequence-free.
Six months earlier, on July 19, 1974, just a few days before Wiesner sent his futile invitation to the shah, two letters traveling in the opposite direction from Iran reached MIT. Edward Mason, chair of the nuclear engineering department, and Herman Feshbach, chair of the physics department, received letters from Gholam Kazemian, the shah’s minister for cultural affairs, asking if Iran could send “a number of promising young Iranians” chosen by the shah’s newly created Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) to MIT for “a solid Master’s program in the field of Nuclear Engineering.”
“I am writing to ask you if your department is willing to provide such training for our candidates,” the letters read. “The trainees’ total expenses will be paid by the Iranian Government and I will personally supervise their training program while they are in this country.”
“We would be pleased to work with you,” Mason replied. Similar programs already existed at the institute to “train men in the specific needs of their home countries” — although it’s not entirely clear which programs he was referring to.
In order to set one up for Iran, Mason wrote, he and his colleagues first needed to better understand Iran’s plans for nuclear power, and its “long range interests” concerning the training they sought from MIT.
On Aug. 6, Mason and Feshbach flew to Washington where, according to a letter sent to Kazemian the next day, they gained a better understanding and remained “pleased to work with you.” Mason later recalled that the meeting centered mostly around Iran’s interest in a cohort of nuclear scientists who would, after receiving MIT training, operate the reactors (already purchased from France and West Germany) of its future energy industry.
Driving back to the airport, the two professors mulled over the scope of the program. Kazemian had hinted at the enrollment of a large number of students, and this worried them. “We would like to recommend that, if at all possible, the Iranian Government attempt to begin the program by sending a small number of Iranians to MIT beginning in January,” Mason wrote, suggesting a pilot group of “some four to six candidates.” This way, he explained, the initial semester could inform a possible expansion of the program to include more students.
Several months passed with no communication, according to Hansen. Then, on Dec. 6, Kazemian wrote to Feshbach saying he’d had word from Tehran that the AEOI was “proceeding with the applications for admission.”
On Jan. 14, 1975, “quite unexpectedly,” Mason received a cable from the president of the AEOI: “In reference to our correspondence with you concerning the enrolment of 27 of our students in your graduate school for nuclear studies and its related fields stop please be advised that 25 applications have been completed and are on their way to MIT and 20 more will follow shortly stop.”
With 45 applications en route, and Iran’s expectation that 27 would be accepted, MIT had unwittingly bitten off more than it could chew. The special Iranian cohort would nearly double the size of the graduate program. In the Jan. 23 memorandum, Hansen laid out five possible routes. The easiest, he wrote, would be to have Iran pay extra “for the privilege of having a special case made for their students.” This would of course set a precedent, he warned. Already the nuclear engineering department had been petitioned for similarly special treatment by Spain, Brazil and China.
Feshbach wasn’t satisfied. “I am very much concerned with the number of students,” he wrote in response to Hansen, reiterating his suggestion of a small pilot group. “I very strongly believe that any other course of action would open up the possibilities of a major disaster.” He called for the Iranians to be persuaded otherwise and for there to be an immediate inquiry into “the nature of the background of the students.”
Hansen’s suggestion won out, and MIT offered Iran places for 27 students for $10,000 each (about $62,000 today), nearly triple what the rest of the students would be paying. Negotiations stumbled slightly on the issue of the price tag, but in the end Iran agreed. All in all, with every expense charged by MIT for the Iranian students, the shah was slated to pay around $10 million in today’s money to train around 50 nuclear scientists, according to a Boston Globe article at the time.
“Is MIT’s financial crisis that serious?” an editorial in the March 7 Tech issue asked. Titled “Selling MIT: Bombs for the Shah,” the opinion piece, written on behalf of the newspaper’s entire editorial board, called on students and faculty to push back against the program. By this time, Hansen had flown to Tehran to interview the selected students and present a draft contract.
“Seldom is there an issue where actions of the MIT community can have such an effect on national and international affairs,” the column read. “A resounding ‘No!’ from the community to the Institute’s plans to train nuclear engineers for the Shah could, if MIT is as influential in the scientific world as MIT likes to keep telling itself it is, be a leading factor in forcing deeper consideration of the issues involved everywhere.”
“In the meantime, MIT can try to think of other, less reprehensible ways to make ends meet which will not involve the moral abdication implied by this plan.”
That same day, in Washington, a State Department spokesperson told journalists that negotiations with Iran on a $7 billion nuclear reactor sale (announced, coincidentally, on the same day as the MIT-Iran deal) had faltered due to the difficulty of convincing Iran not to reprocess its own spent uranium fuel — which would produce the pure plutonium used for nuclear bombs.
Three days after the U.S. government halted its negotiations with Iran, MIT and Iran concluded their own. From that point until the end of the academic year, the special training program defined campus politics and featured in all but one edition of the student newspaper.
The enthusiasm of Gordon Brown accounted for most of the engine fuel that drove the MIT-Iran deal forward. He was Australian-born, and an MIT creation through and through. An undergraduate and then graduate student in the electrical engineering department, he eventually overhauled both those curricula as department head and later dean of engineering, adapting his field to the post-WWII electronic age. He considered himself well-versed in the inner workings of Iran and had already served as a consultant to the shah’s Isfahan nuclear project. In MIT’s archives, it’s not unusual to see little notes from Brown pop up wherever the relationship between MIT and Iran needed encouragement — on either side.
“Iran has the desire to achieve a leadership role in science and technology on a broad front,” he wrote in a letter on March 28. “Iran has the money to finance the work. Iranians are neither stupid nor wicked. The population will be approaching 60 million in a few decades.”
“I would hope that some of us can be part of the action – a member of the club so to speak. But we will not be admitted if we shut the door in their face by rejecting the present proposal, by burying our heads in the sand. We will maximize our leverage to influence mankind’s thinking only if we participate.”
The recipient of this five-page letter was his colleague of more than 10 years, computer science professor Joseph Weizenbaum, who lent the program’s opposition a similar level of vigor, albeit with more literary prowess and even, at times, humor (as a Robert Benchley fan).
Brown told Weizenbaum he was “relieved” to know that MIT would have a chance to instill its “value system in the minds of the Iranian students,” avoiding, in the process, the risk that some morally unsound country would get there first and paint its nefarious values onto the blank canvas of the Iranian nuclear industry.
Weizenbaum was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and a self-proclaimed black sheep in his field who spent his career as both creator and critic of groundbreaking technology (including the first chatbot, ELIZA). He often warned against humanity using technology as an excuse to avoid the effort that is required at times to live by one’s values. It’s not hard to see the unlikelihood of his being convinced by arguments like “be a member of the club” or “instill value systems.”
“You assume, of course, that our value system is worthy of being so propagated,” he wrote back on April 1, “an assumption not all the peoples of the earth who have experienced its translation into action would readily grant.” As for the club: “Often the initiation fee of the clubs one must join in order to become an insider is precisely that one must adopt the very rules, standards, and modalities of action that at the outset one wished to change.”
The next day, the two were given a chance to make their arguments known to the rest of the faculty. Nearly 500 people crammed themselves into room 10-250 of Huntington Hall for a special faculty meeting, during which William Pounds, dean of the Sloan School of Management, revealed that the special program for Iranian students was but one of five contracts, “which I know about,” in development with the shah.
Faculty asked whether the program was part of U.S. foreign policy, whether the State Department had been informed and whether a “proliferation of foreign-oriented programs” would change MIT’s character, but the primary concern among faculty appeared to be the special admissions process, also referred to as “academic prostitution.” Hansen responded that the number of students the department accepted was generally determined by the resources at its disposal — ergo, more resources, more spots. He was often more welcoming of criticism than his peers (there’s a picture of him on the floor alongside students at a sit-in protest against the program, listening to their grievances) and more eager to assuage. The Iranian program was just a “one-time” experiment, he assured.
Five professors, led by the physicist Philip Morrison and including Weizenbaum, moved to create a standing committee made of both faculty and students for evaluating any major MIT agreements that could affect established institute policies or “commit the Institute to positions on seriously controversial issues of a social or political nature.”
MIT’s power structure left faculty out in the cold on important decisions, Morrison told the overflowing room. “MIT should not be run autocratically.” The explicit relationship with Iran went “far beyond the dribble of [MIT] students from around the world,” he said, and an administration that stood to benefit from the program was not in a position to objectively evaluate its effects.
His presence in the debate carries special meaning considering that he worked on the Manhattan Project, witnessed the first nuclear explosion, and helped load the atomic bomb that would instantly kill around 40,000 people in Nagasaki onto the aircraft assigned to drop it — but that was before he became an adamant nonproliferation activist.
The previous day, four professors, Noam Chomsky among them, along with representatives from the Iranian Student Association (ISA) and the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran held a teach-in titled “MIT, Iran and Nuclear Proliferation,” which some 600 people attended.
The ISA had objected to the program from the first meeting called to announce the sealed deal. On that day, March 14, around 500 “mostly critical” MIT students and faculty gathered to hear the news delivered by Wiesner, Alfred Keil, the dean of engineering, Parviz Payvar, dean of the energy division at AMUT, and Hansen, newly returned from Iran, where he accepted 23 “highly qualified” students.
“We feel the core of the whole problem here is: Who is going to benefit and whose interests will the program serve?” one ISA member said, addressing the meeting. “While the conditions of Iranian peasants get worse, the shah is out buying reactors to improve his own power.”
The speaker described torture, poverty and malnutrition, professors arrested for criticizing the regime and students shot for protesting on campus. “It was mentioned that Iran is a signatory to the nonproliferation treaty; Iran is also a signatory to the human rights declaration,” they said ironically, met by laughter and applause.
“We want the MIT community to say ‘No’ … we don’t want to provide nuclear weapons or any kind of nuclear technology to a nut who has been, for 25 years, killing his own people and intervening in the affairs of other countries.” A transcript from the meeting noted: “[applause–10 seconds or more. Loud]”
Most Iranian students published or quoted in The Tech that spring are unnamed. One very prominent student, however, seemed content without anonymity’s protection. Ali Akbar Salehi wasn’t a big name yet, but in a few decades’ time, he would become Iran’s chief nuclear scientist and lead the 2015 negotiations with the Obama administration. In spring 1975, Salehi was still a doctoral student in MIT’s nuclear engineering department. He opposed the special program, despite his poster boy potential: “It’s not efficient to send Iranians to MIT to learn nuclear engineering,” he told The Tech. “The money they are paying in the MIT contract could be used to send many more students somewhere else.”
Or even better, he argued, that money could be spent improving Iranian schools for a future generation of people trained at home. Upon completing his doctorate, Salehi returned to Iran, where, after the revolution, he served as chancellor of the Sharif University of Technology, formerly AMUT, the institute that MIT had helped the shah remodel after itself.
The 1975 student election ballots laid several decisions before voters. As well as deciding who would lead next year’s Undergraduate Association, they were called upon to vote in two referendums: a new UA constitution and the Iranian program.
The latter read: “Resolved: The undergraduates of MIT call for the MIT administration to publish all agreements with the government of Iran and to not implement the special program to train nuclear engineers for the Shah of Iran.”
In 1974, only 710 undergrads voted. Thanks to the Iranian program (according to the Elections Committee), that number nearly doubled in 1975 to 1,286: 214 for the Iranian program and 1,001 against (with 71 abstentions). In the end, the results functioned only as a record of the student body’s position on the issue. Nothing bound the administration to its outcome.
The week before the referendum, which took place on April 16, The Tech dedicated its entire center spread to commentary about the Iranian program, featuring the who’s who of the debate: Hansen, Brown, Weizenbaum, the Coalition Against Training Nuclear Engineers for the Shah (CATNES), and an open letter penned by Chomsky and professor of literature Wayne O’Neil, and signed by 55 other “members of the MIT community.”
Brown, with his usual vigor, called the debate “emotional” and “unstructured,” its participants bringing up “about half a dozen arguments at random.” The real issue, according to Brown, was that MIT didn’t know if it should operate as a participatory or representative democracy — an unnecessary conundrum when faced with “the simple fact that the Administration must run the Institute.”
He urged MIT to “proceed aggressively” with the training, which he insisted “must be done.” He was “grateful” that there were so many handpicked Iranian students coming — this way it was certain that MIT alumni would end up in influential positions in Iranian government.
The shah’s government appealed less to Chomsky, O’Neil and their 55 co-signatories. “Although it is well and good to speak of helping the people of Iran, it is not the people of Iran who have asked for our help,” they wrote. “It is their government, and – put bluntly – that government is a military dictatorship of the worst sort.”
Hansen, calmly and methodically addressing his opponents’ arguments, said his department had 66 foreign students enrolled as of last September, 44 of whom came from nondemocratic countries, and 24 of those received financial support from their governments. “As a matter of policy, we have never considered the political view of the country of origin of an applicant,” he wrote. “I feel it would be a mistake to impose any political conditions on the admissibility of students.”
But this was not the usual admission process. “A Rockefeller – no matter how well qualified – could not buy his way into MIT by offering to defray all costs,” Chomsky and O’Neil wrote. “IBM could not buy special graduate admission to MIT for even one of its high-power electrical engineers.”
“It is axiomatic that admission to the university is open to individuals and, where spaces are limited, that admission is based on free competition among individuals.” Exceptions can be made from time to time, they said, but this case did not warrant one.
“Based on the thoroughly militaristic nature of the regime,” the CATNES letter read, “there are strong grounds to assume that the Shah will develop nuclear weapons via the supposedly harmless reactor technology.” Student opponents of the admissions also often argued that Iran had more oil than it knew what to do with and could not reasonably be desperate for nuclear energy. At best, the shah would use the nuclear program to further entrench his abandonment of the Iranian people (if he really cared about them, the coalition argued, he would invest in agricultural technology instead) — at worst, an already violent leader would be in possession of the most violent weapon.
“Most experts believe the safeguards are sufficient,” Hansen responded. Iran had signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — which includes the promise from nuclearized countries to share energy technology — and had “done everything they have been asked to do.”
“If nations such as the United States and others are to tell underdeveloped countries that they cannot have the benefits of nuclear power, then there is no question that the Nonproliferation Treaty itself will crumble,” Hansen warned.
(Brown maintained that there was no evidence to support claims of the shah’s nuclear ambitions. A week later, political scientist and arms control expert Anne Hessing Cahn held a seminar at MIT. She had just returned from Iran and concurred that there was no “hard data” about the shah’s intentions, but warned that once Iran’s first four reactors became operational, it would be capable of producing a bomb a day. In her view, Iran was “keeping its options open,” and she feared it would choose proliferation.)
In his letter, Weizenbaum put bombs and academic integrity aside and spoke mostly of the Iranian people. “The proposed program is officially characterized as, among other things, an experiment designed to measure the impact other such programs might have on the Institute. No one appears to have realized that the Iranian people are the actual subjects of the experiment … [their] interests need first and foremost to be defended.”
MIT had the freedom not to sign contracts with Iran, he wrote, so, by choosing to do so knowing that torture was an Iranian state policy, the institute was identifying itself with that torture. “Every academic delegation that engages in friendly conversations with [imprisoned Iranian dissidents’] government leaders buttresses their government and thus prolongs and intensifies their and the people’s suffering.”
He added, “When one has, for only a brief moment, the opportunity to enter a political prison in which people are tortured, does one act so as to comfort the imprisoned or does one mock them and their suffering by counting silver with their tormentors?”
The same day of the referendum, the faculty, at CATNES’ request, held yet another special meeting on the issue. Again, more than 300 people squeezed themselves into the hall to hear students argue vehemently against the program, which Pounds insisted could not be shut down.
The gathered faculty heard three new motions. The first, from Pounds and Morrison, called for the establishment of an ad hoc committee appointed by Wiesner to suggest how the institute might better review its international commitments — ad hoc, not standing, and advisory, not binding. The motion passed.
The second motion, put forward by an associate professor in social sciences, Joel Yellin, called for the next year of Iranian students not to be admitted through the same special process granted to the first years, and was defeated. He had initially presented the motion at the April 4 meeting, where he criticized the program for being an experiment without any evaluation and a precedent for overriding the principle of enrollment based on competence and intellectual promise. He sugarcoated where possible and emphasized belief in his colleagues’ good intentions — to no avail. At least one nuclear engineering professor let it be known he felt personally attacked by the motion, and the meeting dissolved into debate, intensified by a motion to allow an Iranian student representative to present a statement — defeated.
The third motion at the April 16 meeting came from Weizenbaum and called for the program to be suspended altogether. According to The Tech, his motion received little discussion and even fewer votes. After Pounds’ own motion was passed, and before the two more weighty motions were put to the vote, he warned ominously that the program’s cancellation would have “serious consequences.”
According to McNamee, the Tech editor-in-chief, Pounds and the head of the Center for Advanced Engineering, Myron Tribus, scoffed at the idea that MIT faculty and students should deign to debate nuclear proliferation when the experts had already weighed in and determined it irrelevant. Tribus went further, saying students had no business discussing institute programs, meddling in the Administration’s affairs. McNamee reported that, instead of answering questions from sceptical students, Pounds asked them what country they were from and if they preferred that MIT simply shut out international students altogether. In the end, McNamee wrote, “The faculty yielded to the cult of the expert.”
In 2007, Boston Globe journalist Farah Stockman tracked down 28 of the 35 Iranians who graduated from the special program. Three had returned to Iran to help build up its nuclear program, two had died (one in a car crash, the other executed for forbidden political activities) and nearly two-thirds were working in the U.S. Stockman also learned that six students sent to the program had immediately switched to business school.
One of the graduates worked for the IAEO for a few years before the revolution. He told Stockman his fellow scientists poured millions of dollars into grandiose and largely impractical nuclear research, “just to show that they were big.”
After the revolution, the MIT graduates in Iran received letters saying their services were no longer needed. Then, in the early 1980s, Iran changed course and started reaching out to former MIT students still living in the U.S. to persuade them to come back and work — and Salehi took part in the campaign. One of the graduates was told he either had to serve the agreed-upon two years in the IAEO or repay his MIT tuition.
On Feb. 4, 1975, exactly one month before The Tech broke news of the program, 180 MIT alumni braved Washington’s version of a snowstorm (2 inches, if that) to attend a reception and dinner at the Iranian Embassy.
These 180 were the lucky ones. One thousand four hundred MIT alumni and guests initially responded to the event’s announcement, and it was up to the MIT Club of Washington to pick only the most deserving. Wiesner, of course, made the cut and thus enjoyed, alongside his colleagues but ranked above them, as “special guest,” the food and drink, and a 45-minute informal address by the ambassador, which, according to MIT’s Technology Review, plodded through the history of Iranian foreign policy, with special attention given to relations with the United States of America. When it was his turn to speak, Wiesner mentioned “serious talks about the development of programs that would be of interest to both parties.”
The anonymous Technology Review journalist capped off their report of the event with a description of the evening’s atmosphere: “The sense of growing friendship was unmistakable under the mirrored ceilings of the Imperial Embassy.”
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