Student Day: the day young Iranians revolted against U.S. imperialism 

TEHRAN – Iran commemorates Student Day on December 7th, honoring the martyrdom of three students martyred during a 1953 protest at Tehran University against a visit by then-U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon.

The protests were held four months after the 1953 August coup against the democratically-elected Mohammad Mossadegh government. The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the United Kingdom Secret Intelligence Service MI6 led the coup in which the Iranian government was toppled in favor of Mohammad Reza Shah’s authoritarian rule. It was a retaliatory move by those two foreign powers against an initiative taken by Mossadegh to nationalize Iran’s oil industry.

When did the student movement begin?  

The student movement’s roots trace back to the 1941 overthrow of Reza Shah Pahlavi, which resulted from the Allied occupation of Iran during World War II. In the decade following his ascension, the young Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (then 24) struggled to assert his authoritarian control over the diverse political landscape that had emerged after his father’s exile.

Iranians in Tehran and other major towns were struggling for the survival of their country under occupation. A powerful nationalist and religious movement led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and Ayatollah Sayyed Abol-Ghasem Mostafavi-Kashani was seen as a threat to the Shah. 

The student movement supported the Mossadegh government from the very beginning as Ayatollah Kashani and the clerics and Bazar did. In this vein, the University of Tehran (UT), the only modern academic center in Iran back then, became the major base for the students’ campaign against the authoritarian regime of the Shah and foreign interference in the country’s affairs. 

Following the 1953 coup that overthrew the Mossadegh government for its nationalization of the country’s oil wealth, the UT campus was still resisting the coup plotters while the Shah regime had been successful in its crackdown on the outside-university opposition movement led by clerics and ordinary people in Bazaar. The regime’s security forces would repeatedly attack protesting students on the campus of the university in a bid to silence them but the students’ activism and their protests were unabating. 
Almost four months after the August coup, the students were still protesting against the newly announced resumption of ties with the United Kingdom and also the upcoming visit the U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon, which was slated to take place on December 9.
The students were mainly furious at the U.S. and the U.K.’s role in staging the August coup.
When the students were protesting on the university campus on December 7, the regime’s troops opened fire on them, martyring three of them and wounding several others at the UT Faculty of Engineering.

What happened after the Shah regime’s crackdown?

After the Shah regime’s brutality on the campus of Tehran University, the US Vice President still paid the visit and expressed Washington’s full support for Iran to become a dictatorial monarchy. 

When Nixon became the U.S. President, he once again visited Tehran in a show of support for the Shah’s dictatorial regime. “The visit in May of 1972 was strategically important to reinforce Iran’s primacy in maintaining regional stability and project Western influence in the region,” the Nixon Foundation wrote later in a memoir on the visit published on its website.

In memory of the three martyred students Mostafa Bozorgnia, Ahmad Ghandchi and Mehdi Shariat Razavi- December 7 has come to be named the Student Day in Iran. The day signifies the brutality of the Pahlavi regime and also marks the opposition to U.S. imperialism in Iran. 

Prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Shah’s regime suppressed annual commemorations of Student Day. Since the revolution, the day is observed with rallies and gatherings condemning the Shah’s repressive policies toward students and his reliance on the United States.