Tehran’s elite have no business having plum jobs in our universities

The detention of Hamideh Soleimani Afshar in Los Angeles—niece of the late IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani—is more than a tabloid headline. Following the federal revocation of her green card and the reported exit of Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani from Emory University, a glaring systemic failure has been laid bare. 

While the Iranian regime leads choreographed chants of “Death to America,” its ruling elite have spent decades securing a “Plan B” inside the very Western institutions they publicly condemn.

In Tehran, they are known as the Aghazadeh—the “noble-born.” 

While ordinary Iranians are crushed by triple-digit inflation and the brutal whims of the morality police, the children of the revolution are building high-status careers in the West. 

This isn’t a matter of individual guilt; it’s a matter of institutional blindness.

The list of “regime-adjacent” academics is long and strategically positioned. Leila Khatami, daughter of former President Mohammad Khatami, is a mathematics professor in New York. Ehsan Nobakht, son of a former deputy health minister, reached the faculty at George Washington University. Zahra Mohaghegh, with ties to the Larijani power network, oversees research in nuclear and radiological engineering at the University of Illinois. Zeinab Hajjarian, daughter of senior strategist Saeed Hajjarian, entered the biomedical faculty at UMass Lowell. In the UK, Hadi Larijani directs a technology research center at Glasgow Caledonian University.

The standard defense is that a child should not be punished for the sins of the father. 

That is a fine principle for a courtroom, but a lethal one for national security. 

In an authoritarian state, power is familial. It is built on bloodlines and patronage. A son or daughter of a high-ranking official is an extension of an influence network, not a detached “global citizen.” When they occupy roles in nuclear engineering or public policy, they gain access to the intellectual heart of the West.

Why is this allowed? Because Western universities have traded their moral authority for a corporate balance sheet. 

They chase rankings and foreign capital, and once billions start flowing in from places like Qatar or China, administrators lose the stomach for difficult questions. 

By rebranding regime insiders as “global talent,” they provide a convenient shield against scrutiny.

The financial reality is staggering. Parents are currently paying over $80,000 a year for tuition and housing, believing they are buying a world-class education. They are rarely informed that the faculty shaping their children’s worldviews—or leading sensitive research labs—are the direct beneficiaries of regimes that hang dissidents from cranes. 

This isn’t “diversity”; it’s institutional amnesia.

For an Iranian student who has fled the IRGC’s reach, seeing a regime insider’s relative in a position of authority on campus is a chilling reminder that the regime’s shadow is long. 

It silences the very voices universities claim to protect. If a school cannot distinguish between a legitimate refugee and an Aghazadeh taking a faculty seat as a fallback career, it has ceased to be a serious institution.

The cases of Soleimani Afshar and Ardeshir-Larijani suggest that Washington may finally be paying attention. But a few detentions do not fix a decade of rot. Academic freedom does not mandate a suicide pact with hostile regimes.

The university is the mind of a civilization. 

If we allow those who represent the world’s most repressive systems to occupy its leadership, we are being hollowed out from within. There is a deep, dark irony in the fact that while the Iranian elite burn American flags in the streets of Tehran, they are fighting for tenure in the streets of Manhattan and London. We should stop pretending that the “faculty lounge” is a sanctuary from geopolitics; for the children of the regime, it has simply become the most comfortable place to hide.

Most Americans wouldn’t expect to see the niece of an enemy general living a subsidized life in a California suburb, just as they wouldn’t expect a parent to pay a small fortune to have their child’s nuclear engineering lab run by a Larijani. We are subsidizing the soft-power expansion of our own adversaries and calling it “enlightenment.” 

It’s time our universities learned that some backgrounds are not just a matter of “perspective,” but a matter of record.

Kevin Cohen is CEO of RealEye, Head of Cyber Intelligence at Trident Group America, and a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The Telegraph, The Spectator.