Building an “Academic Bridge”: U.S.-Iran Relations and Educational Cooperation during the 1950s

This paper explores the origins of educational cooperation between the United States and Iran in the 1950s. It focuses on two nominally private organizations – the Ford Foundation and the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME) – that made international education the foundation for Iran’s economic development and a pillar of the U.S.-Iran relationship. It argues that these organizations and the Iranians who received their assistance became enmeshed in a transnational web of conflicting interests, torn between concerns about Iran’s vanishing democracy and the push toward economic development.

Ford Foundation records show how it worked with the Plan Organization, the arm of the Iranian government that wrote the nation’s seven-year plans. Specifically, Ford staffed the Plan Organization’s Economic Bureau with a cadre of Western-educated technocratic elites capable of putting Iran’s oil revenue to good use but unwilling to challenge Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s authoritarianism. AFME, a group tied covertly to the CIA, drew on established missionary links between Lafayette College and Iran to establish the Iranian Student Association in the United States. AFME’s annual reports and an assemblage of documents from the Hoover Institution Archives reveal how the American educational advisers helped accomplished Iranian youths transition to university life in the United States and satisfy Iran’s manpower needs.

While the shah grew leery of the Plan Organization’s ability to create an autonomous center of power in the Iranian government, the Iranian Student Association became openly anti-shah in fall 1960 in a shift that forced AFME to cut all ties with the organization. As these two cases indicate, American proponents of international education were caught between an intensifying Iranian nationalism and a U.S. policy that supported the shah as an agent of modernization and anti-communism in Iran.