| Summary/Abstract |
The tension between “modernization” and “rights” defined the relationship between Americans and Iranians from the 1950s through the 1970s. The dynamic interplay between these two transnational currents is best understood through the lens of international education. U.S. policy makers envisaged Western-educated Iranians as the bastion of pro-Americanism required to provide the cultural underpinnings of the Washington–Tehran alliance. But the influx of Iranian students to American campuses globalized U.S. institutions of higher education and, in the process, produced an alternate alliance of Iranian youths and progressive Americans that rejected Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s authoritarian model of development, called for the realization of human rights in Iran, and revealed the contradictions inherent in a U.S. strategy that promoted student exchange while at the same time supporting the shah as an agent of modernization and anti-Communism.
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