Thousands of students protested this weekend at a university in northwestern Iran over the alleged sexual harassment of a female student by the university’s vice chancellor.

According to reports by Agence France-Presse and Reuters, two news agencies, the reformist Iranian newspaper Etemad reported today that students at Zanjan University broke into the vice chancellor’s office, handed the official over to the university’s security officers, and proceeded to stage a sit-in on Saturday night in a campus athletics facility.

“The vice chancellor is alleged to have sexually harassed the girl while she was in his office to resolve a problem with the committee of conduct — a disciplinary body which monitors students’ activities,” Agence France-Presse reported.

The official had reportedly attempted on several occasions to close the university’s student Islamic association by accusing its members of moral misbehavior.

The episode is noteworthy because, although Iranian students have long been a catalyst for wider social and political activism in the country, in recent months a government crackdown has effectively curtailed the student movement.

In the most high-profile recent episode, three students at Amir Kabir University of Technology, in Tehran, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was greeted with protests during a 2006 visit, were sentenced to jail — where they remain — for publishing supposedly un-Islamic images in student publications. —Aisha Labi