An Urgent Global Academic Appeal on the Assault against Science, Knowledge, and Civilization
Office of the President
University of Tehran
Tehran, Iran
19 June 2025
To:
§His Excellency Professor Alan M. Garber, President of Harvard University, the US
§Her Excellency Professor Irene Tracey, Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford, the UK
§Her Excellency Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the UK
§His Excellency Professor Richard K. ‘Rich’ Lyons, Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, the US
§Her Excellency Professor Maurie McInnis, President of Yale University, the US
§Her Excellency Ms. Claire Shipman, Acting President of Columbia University, the US
§His Excellency Professor Sir Peter Mathieson, Principal and Vice Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, the UK
§Her Excellency Professor Nathalie Drach-Temam, President of Sorbonne University, France
§Her Excellency Professor Frances Corner, OBE, Vice Chancellor of Goldsmiths, University of London, the UK
§His Excellency Professor Adam Habib, Vice Chancellor and Director of SOAS, University of London, the UK
§His Excellency Professor Luis Vassy, President of Sciences Po (Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris), France
§His Excellency Professor Arnaud Laimé, President of Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint Denis, France
§Her Excellency Professor Isabelle von Bueltzingsloewen, President of Université Lyon 2, France
§His Excellency Professor Romain Huret, President of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), France
§His Excellency Professor Joel Towers, President of The New School, the US
§His Excellency Professor Joshua Brumberg, President of CUNY Graduate Center, the US
Subject: An Urgent Global Academic Appeal on the Assault against Science, Knowledge, and Civilization
Your Excellencies,
It is with the utmost reverence, solemnity, and intellectual solidarity that I address you at this moment of grave historic consequence—not solely in my capacity as President of University of Tehran, but as a fellow guardian of our shared intellectual inheritance, and as one bound by an unwavering obligation to preserve the sanctity of education, the integrity of research, and the continuity of culture amidst the encroaching shadows of profound and unprecedented peril. The war initiated by the Israeli regime against the Islamic Republic of Iran since 13 June 2025 has precipitated an assault not only upon the sovereign integrity of a nation, but upon the very bedrock of scientific advancement, humanistic exploration, and the enduring continuity of the shared international civilization itself.
This appeal stands as a formal and urgent academic entreaty—a solemn invocation for collective reflection, swift and resolute intervention, and the mobilization of the world’s universities—those hallowed bastions of reason, liberty, and human dignity—in the defense of what sustains of our common intellectual and moral heritage.
Since the commencement of the Israeli regime's aggression—and based on the most current verified data—over 200 distinct air and missile strikes have been carried out across Iran. These strikes have been deliberately and systematically aimed at densely populated civilian areas, hospitals, universities, scientific institutions, energy infrastructure, and cultural landmarks. The toll is staggering: over 585 individuals—mostly civilians, including women and children—have been killed, and more than 1,665 injured.
From the outset, these calculated acts of aggression against bearers of enlightenment and their academic institutions have constituted one of the most egregious assaults on the universal sanctity of scientific endeavor. Iran’s most distinguished scientists, physicists, and engineers—men and women whose life’s work was not directed toward war but toward the peaceful advancement of human knowledge—have been targeted in a systematic aggression of elimination.
Universities have been bombed. Laboratories reduced to ash. Libraries—repositories of collective memory—obliterated. Research centers incapacitated. Several leading academic campuses and the Shahid Karimi metals research group in Tehran, the nuclear research facility in Isfahan, and Energy Parts Plant in Karaj have all suffered irreplaceable losses. This is not collateral damage. It is targeted epistemicide: the deliberate extermination of a nation's scientific and cultural lifeblood.
The ramifications of this aggression extend far beyond any single nation’s borders. The deliberate devastation of nuclear research facilities—an unequivocal breach of IAEA safeguards and established international conventions—endangers the ecological and humanitarian well-being of the global community at large. The assassination of physicists and scholars signals the death knell for academic immunity, replacing scholarly debate with targeted violence. And the normalization of military strikes against universities threatens to collapse the very idea of the university as a sanctuary for thought, dialogue, and dissent.
What is unfolding is the erosion of the global scientific commons. It is the turning of the university into a battlefield. It is the conversion of knowledge into a casualty of war.
Your Excellencies,
Throughout history, the university has stood as a beacon in dark times—a temple of light in an age of unreason. The libraries of ancient Iran, the colleges of Córdoba, the salons of the Enlightenment, and the laboratories of the modern era have all flourished not because they were immune to power, but because they preserved their autonomy against it.
This autonomy is now imperiled. The Israeli regime’s systematic targeting of Iran’s scientific infrastructure represents an unprecedented violation of the global pact that binds us: that knowledge must never be a target, and that its custodians—regardless of nation or creed—must be preserved as stewards of humanity’s collective advancement.
We are therefore compelled, with deep urgency, to call upon you for principled, collective academic resistance. As leaders of the world’s most distinguished universities, your voices carry weight across continents. Silence and inaction in this moment render us incapable of protecting the very institutions upon which our civilizations rely.
Hence, on behalf of University of Tehran, and in the name of all academic institutions exposed to existential threat, we appeal to you to take the following moral and practical measures:
1. Issue a Joint Statement condemning the targeted destruction of scientific, cultural, and educational institutions in Iran as a crime against civilization and a violation of international academic norms.
2. Call for the Protection of Scientific Institutions under international humanitarian law, reaffirming that universities, laboratories, and cultural institutions are not legitimate military targets and must be afforded absolute protection.
3. Establish an Emergency Global Academic Forum, with representation from leading universities and scholarly bodies worldwide, to investigate and document attacks on scientific infrastructure and to promote accountability and reparation.
4. Urge Your Respective Governments to intervene diplomatically and demand the immediate cessation of hostilities, specifically those that jeopardize the global scientific order and the sanctity of knowledge.
This may be our last chance to act before irreversible loss becomes the historical record. The global university community must rise as the conscience of humanity. If we fail to speak now, who shall speak when the next scientist is silenced and the next university turned to dust?
Your Excellencies,
I speak with the mournful clarity of one who has walked the ruins of science and heard the echo of extinguished voices once dedicated to the flourishing of humankind.
May our universities, long the lodestars of human progress, not falter now. May we, together, rescue from the fire that which cannot be rebuilt: the spirit of science, the memory of culture, and the hope of future generations.
Respectfully submitted,
Prof. Mohammad Hossein Omid
President of University of Tehran, I.R. of Iran
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