Iran stupidly restricts women students

By Dale McFeatters

Rarely does a country make a conscious decision to dumb itself down. But it happens. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. China during Mao's Great Leap Forward. Japan under the 2 1/2 centuries of the Edo period.

Now Iran has decided its young women have become too smart for their own good and the comfort of its male chauvinist clerics, who have seen long-held and cherished stereotypes about women threatened.

So the theocratic government has banned women from 77 undergraduate courses in the coming year, including, according to The Telegraph of Great Britain, computer science, electrical engineering, industrial engineering, nuclear physics, business management, hotel management, English literature and English translation. These last two were no doubt responsible for the introduction of heretical ideas.

The specialty Oil Industry University campuses have banned women altogether.

According to The Telegraph, "Senior clerics in Iran's theocratic regime have become concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women, including declining birth and marriage rates."

It seems to be a tenet of the clerics that women are the inferior sex, but once given the chance at higher education women have excelled. The Telegraph says women outnumbered men by three to two in passing this year's university entrance exams. And United Nations figures show Iran has the highest ratio of female to male undergraduates in the world.

Human rights activist and Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, now in exile in Britain, has demanded a U.N. investigation. She told the U.N. secretary general and the high commissioner for human rights that the study restrictions were part of a concerted campaign to reduce the number of women in universities and weaken the Iranian feminist movement that has been in the forefront of protests against the regime.

Experience has shown that one of the surest paths to prosperity and progress in a nation is educating women and improving their access to professions. Having clamped down on higher education for women, the clerics may be more secure in their masculinity but they will end up presiding over a dumber nation.

Dale McFeatters is an editorial writer for Scripps Howard News Service.