Iran’s hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, turned up the pressure today on the country’s universities by calling on conservative students to oppose liberal and secular faculty members. “Today, students should shout at the president,” the official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Mr. Ahmedinejad as saying to a group of students, “and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present at the universities.” The news agency’s quote was carried in an article by the Associated Press.

The AP report said the president appeared to be harking back to the “cultural revolution” that followed the country’s 1979 Islamic revolution. Universities were closed for almost three years while radical students helped purge large numbers of professors considered too liberal. Last November the government abruptly appointed a conservative cleric to head Tehran University, the country’s largest institution (The Chronicle, November 29, 2005). And in June there were concerns that some of the academics put on an obligatory-retirement list had been chosen because of their liberal ideology (The Chronicle, June 28).

Still, commentators today said Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments appeared more rhetorical—an effort to fire up his small but militant base among students—than a signal of any imminent policy changes. Nasser Hadian-Jazy, a professor of international relations at Tehran University, said the country’s higher-education institutions remained autonomous, for now. Referring to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments, he said, “I doubt that anyone inside the universities would take them as serious statements.”