https://quillette.com/2024/08/08/the-professor-his-nemesis-and-a-scandal-at-oberlin-mohammad-jafar-mahallati-iran-islamism/
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.