Recently Iran’s state broadcaster, IRIB, that the Revolutionary Guard had “identified 400 core members” of , a Netherlands-based online university teaching the humanities and social sciences in Persian. The platform was accused of “soft subversion” and of operating as part of a Western-backed network.

Iran Academia the report as fabricated and as part of an intimidation effort targeting both its staff and learners.

For observers of Iran’s higher education system, the episode is not surprising. Accusations of infiltration and conspiracy have long been used to justify state control of the academic sphere. But this latest attack signals a shift: an attempt to criminalise intellectual activity that takes place entirely outside the Iranian government’s jurisdiction, in digital classrooms it cannot shut down.

Iran Academia was founded in 2012 by Iranian scholars in exile, in response to the shrinking space for academic freedom inside Iran. From the outset, it offered something the formal system was increasingly unable to provide: reliable and uncensored instruction in fields the state watches closely, such as sociology, political science, philosophy and gender studies.

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The platform was designed as a vehicle for those pushed out of higher education because of their activism, beliefs or research interests. It has since built a strong faculty, including sociologist Saeed Peyvandi, philosopher Mohammad-Reza Nikfar and gender studies scholar Nayereh Tohidi, with a student body spanning Iran and the diaspora.

That alone is enough to make it a target in a system that has long viewed the humanities and social sciences as a security matter. Over the past two decades, Iran’s authorities have repeatedly described the social sciences as conduits of foreign influence. Entire areas of inquiry remain functionally off limits. Various ministries have warned of “crises”, promoted “Islamicised” curricula and pushed universities to align research agendas with state priorities. These efforts have been accompanied by academic purges, ideological vetting and the exclusion of politically active students from university study.

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But the rise of online learning and transnational academic networks have created possibilities to evade government control that did not exist a decade ago. Students barred from domestic universities can now study with professors in the US or Europe through little more than an internet connection. Scholars forced into exile can now teach hundreds of students in Iran without crossing a border. For a political system that has relied heavily on the manageability of the campus environment, this new permeability is deeply unsettling.

The choice of language in the IRIB report reveals this discomfort. By framing an online university as a foreign-sponsored “network” of hundreds of operatives, the state attempts to reassert a familiar national security narrative. Unsupervised teaching and intellectual autonomy are indistinguishable from political subversion because scholars who are not aligned with official doctrine must be ideologically motivated, while students who seek instruction abroad must be participating in organised dissent.

Yet this framing is unlikely to put off Iran Academia’s students. Years of underfunding, on top of the ongoing political purges and monitoring, mean that many of Iran’s physical universities now struggle to staff courses, let alone maintain research-led environments. Teaching in the humanities has in some cases been reduced to rote delivery of state-approved content.

By contrast, Iran Academia is not only politically independent, it treats academic work seriously. Courses involve extensive reading lists and sustained engagement with contemporary scholarship and debates mostly absent from official curricula. They help rebuild habits of critical inquiry that have been systematically weakened. This – rather than any foreign affiliation – poses the real challenge to the state’s narrative.

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The campaign against Iran Academia also highlights deeper unease about the emerging relationship between Iran’s younger generation and knowledge. Today’s students have come of age during a prolonged economic crisis, in which academic achievement no longer leads predictably to employment. A growing number see limited prospects inside the country, contributing to a steady outflow of talent. Those who remain are likely to be discontented and very intellectually open to different ways of organising society; the government is painfully aware that students have been central to almost every major civic mobilisation in recent years (many have witnessed classmates arrested or barred from study as a result).

For a government accustomed to limiting the scope for revolution by defining the terms of intellectual life, a generation with alternative sources of education and wider horizons is especially difficult to manage.

The attack on Iran Academia, then, represents a state confronting the limits of its authority over how knowledge circulates. By trying to turn an online university into a security threat, the authorities acknowledge – inadvertently – how much of Iran’s intellectual life now unfolds beyond their reach.

Moreover, as long as the official system remains restrictive and unable to meet individuals’ economic aspirations, alternative spaces for study will continue to grow. In that sense, the state’s futile attempt to police those spaces underscores a broader reality: in an interconnected world, knowledge travels more freely than repression ever can.

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Roohola Ramezani has a PhD in philosophy from Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran. He was formerly a research fellow at the IFK International Research Centre for Cultural Studies in Vienna.