The Professor, His Nemesis, and a Scandal at Oberlin The story of how a liberal college promoted and defended an Iranian Islamist and betrayed its own values. Roya Hakakian
I. A Disappearance
On 28 November 2023, the profile of a tenured professor at Oberlin College disappeared from the school’s website. Only a day earlier, typing Mohammad Jafar Mahallati’s name into the site’s search box returned a page with an extensive biography and links to several of his posts and videos. His photograph was there, too: a bearded man with a greying hairline and a reticent smile that suited his title of Professor of Peace and Friendship Studies. Since 2007, he had been among the most prominent professors on campus.
A former top diplomat who had represented Iran at the United Nations from 1987–89, Mahallati had brought a certain metropolitan pizzazz to the small college, along with glamorous tales from his days of hobnobbing with a global who’s who of politicians and diplomats. Among academics, where consensus is hard to reach, nearly everyone remembers Mahallati as “magisterial.” If Shi’ism had a campaign ad made for the American consumer, Mahallati—who had swapped the Western suit and tie for the mandarin-collar blazer and shirt and drove a siren-red BMW around town—would be that ad.
Even the locals were smitten. The Iranian professor who had given them an annual Day of Friendship, complete with rainbow flags and peace t-shirts, was all the proof they needed that the George W. Bush administration was wrong to call Iran an evil state. With his arrival at Oberlin in 2007, he managed to infuse the humble small town with an air of cosmopolitan grandeur. And a few years later, he was appointed to the prestigious Nancy Schrom Dye Chair in Middle East and North African Studies. The chair’s namesake, Nancy Shrom Dye, was Oberlin’s president from 1994–2007, and it was Dye who brought Mahallati to Oberlin after she met him during two trips to Iran in the mid-2000s.
Now, all traces of that same man—including the nameplate on his office door and his course titles in the online catalogue—have been expunged from Oberlin, with no explanation offered beyond the words “on indefinite leave.” In any other year, the dismissal of a once-celebrated professor, long championed by the college’s highest officials, might not have been worthy of much attention. But this has hardly been just another year for American academia.
The anti-Israel protests that swept through some of the nation’s most august campuses may have been focused on the war in Gaza, but the rhetoric of the participants—whether or not they were Muslim—was frequently laced with Islamist jargon. Students have lined up to perform ritual Muslim prayers, wave Hezbollah or Hamas flags, and repeat Arabic words most of them do not understand. These sympathies among born-and-bred American youth—most of whom, claiming to be atheists, hailed from Christian households—betray an ideological influence that, long before 7 October 2023, had been quietly encroaching upon America’s colleges and universities.
Against this backdrop, the story of Mahallati, one of the earliest purveyors of this influence, assumes a significance that transcends Oberlin itself. To learn how he got his foothold at the college, and how he remained there despite his inadequate scholarly and professorial credentials, is to see how one Islamist propagandist preyed on American “progressive” sympathies to deceive the very people who had welcomed him into their midst.
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