Dear Students from Iran

Dear students from Iran:

It appears that the time has come to say this: I love you.

Iran has been in my consciousness for most of my life. As I child in the United States in the 1970s, I heard often about the Shah on the news. The day the Shah died is burned in my memory. I was packing up my bedroom to move to a new life in the Washington DC suburbs. Because it did not occur to me to retune the little radio that was keeping me company, I listened over and over again to reports about men chanting in the streets of Tehran, “The earthworm of the century is dead.”

Then of course there were the American hostages held at the embassy, who seemed to be the lead story every day for more than a year. I cannot forget the day the hostages flew home, just as Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president. The tension and excitement that day were so intense that my younger brother had a meltdown my whole family still remembers.

The public schools I attended in Northern Virginia were full of children from around the world. I had no idea who was an economic migrant, who was a political refugee, whose heart was in the United States and whose was still abroad. I had friends from Iran, from Libya, from Vietnam, from Korea. The hallways were full of Spanish. All the kids were cooler than I was, and many were kind and friendly and smart. All that mattered more than where they had been born. We were classmates, not enemies.

So I watched with a full heart when Iranian students took to the streets in 2009. Soon after, applications from students Iran started flowing into graduate program I was directing. It has been my privilege to teach and learn from several of you. I am proud of the work we have done together. I have been silently gratified by the notion that we have built personal ties that transcend our national differences. I have not asked you much about Iran not from lack of interest, but because I try not to intrude in my students’ personal lives. You have been kind and friendly and smart, and all of you are cooler than I am.

I do not know how much longer you will be in the United States. I know that some of you are planning on returning home soon. Please take this message to your friends and families in Iran or elsewhere: It is evident that both authoritarian governments and democratic ones are capable of inhumanity and wickedness. The foolishness of our governments does not mean that there must be enmity between our people.

I am not tagging any of you because I do not know what Magnus Frater is watching. I never knew what was safe for you, and I no longer know what is safe for me. But I love you, and I trust that you know who you are.