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Are we ready to bulldoze the universities, yet? It’s not just the Long March left takeover that has hollowed out once-proud institutions and turned them into far-left echo chambers. It’s not just the ideological rigidity that has made universities openly hostile to free speech. Nor the rampant antisemitism that has become gruesomely obvious over the past two years.
If all that wasn’t bad enough, there’s the simple fact that universities are now openly treasonous – cuddling up to our enemies while exporting deranged hatred of our own country. Australian universities just can’t help themselves. While Tehran funds terrorism, builds nukes and jails dissidents, our taxpayer-funded ivory towers are busy providing cover for the mullahs’ propaganda.
Academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert, formerly imprisoned by the Iranian regime for more than two years, has lashed the Australian National University for allowing its name to be used jointly with a top former Iranian government official in calling for relief from Western sanctions.
ANU staffer Farid Rahimi co-authored an editorial with Mohammad Javad Zarif, former Iranian foreign minister and chief nuclear deal negotiator, in an Iranian state academic journal. The piece, published at the start of 2025, whines that US sanctions have “isolated the Iranian scientific community” and demands relief so Tehran can boost its “science diplomacy”, which is somewhat akin to a 1930s academic stumping for Nazi ‘Race Science’.
Zarif wasn’t some retired academic duffer. At the time, he was serving as Iran’s strategic affairs vice-president. This wasn’t scholarly debate. It was soft-power influence operation, with an ANU letterhead.
Dr Moore-Gilbert knows first-hand just how the Iranian regime operates. She spent 804 days in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison, from 2018, after being snatched by the Revolutionary Guard on bogus espionage charges. During her imprisonment, she was kept in solitary confinement, beaten and drugged. Iran being Iran, she was accused of being a ‘Zionist’. Notably, the same luvvies who have been up in arms because an antisemitic ‘academic’ wasn’t invited to one of their lefty groupthink circuses, laughingly dubbed a ‘writer’s festival’, never said a word in Moore-Gilbert’s support.
Naturally, then, she isn’t mincing words.
Dr Moore-Gilbert, an expert in Middle Eastern political science, said the ANU and intelligence agencies should investigate Mr Rahimi.
“How does he have access to the former Iranian foreign minister?” she wrote in a post on X.
“How was it that they came to co-author an article together which, not coincidentally, advances Tehran’s agenda on sanctions under the guise of scholarly ‘research’?
“As any academic who touches on Iran will tell you, this sort of thing is just the tip of the iceberg.
“Universities are the soft underbelly, and continuing to do nothing about foreign interference and transnational repression is no longer an option.”
She’s right. This is foreign influence par excellence – and it’s happening on our dime.
This isn’t a one-off. As I’ve written many times for Good Oil, Australian universities have form for rolling out the red carpet to regimes that hate us. From hosting CCP-linked researchers, to soft-pedalling on Uyghur genocide, to now platforming Iranian regime officials pushing for sanctions relief while the mullahs fund proxies attacking the West. The pattern is clear: our credentialled class cares more about ‘engagement’ with authoritarian thugs and research grants, than national security or basic decency.
It’s all so obvious that even Foreign Minister Penny Wong wrote to universities in February 2023 telling them to cease research cooperation with Iranian state-linked entities. Seven months later, Rahimi submitted his pro-Tehran editorial anyway. Either the universities aren’t listening, or they simply don’t care.
Australian taxpayers fund these institutions to the tune of billions every year. In return, we get academics acting as useful idiots – or worse – for authoritarian regimes. While Iranian-backed militias fire drones designed with the assistance of Australian universities at shipping lanes and Israel, while the regime executes protesters and funds Hamas and Hezbollah, our universities provide the academic sheen of respectability.
Enough. Universities aren’t neutral spaces for ‘scholarship’ when they lend prestige to officials of a terror-sponsoring theocracy. They are the soft underbelly of foreign interference because they’ve spent decades prioritising globalist kudos, foreign students’ fees and ideological purity over Australian interests.
The solution is plain: at the very least, defund the worst offenders, strip taxpayer support from institutions that collaborate with our enemies and demand basic loyalty to the country that pays their salaries.
Or just go nuclear and bulldoze the lot. Start again from scratch. The universities are plainly beyond redemption.
