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Columbia Professors Share Expertise on Iran's Election

Jun. 19, 2009Bookmark and Share

As the world watches hundreds of thousands of Iranians take to the streets of Tehran in protest of last Friday’s disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Columbia professors Gary Sick and Richard Bulliet have been sharing their expertise on the intensifying situation.  Sick, a senior research scholar at Columbia’s Middle East Institute, and Bulliet, a history professor specializing in the Middle East, have been featured on CBS News, PBS and The New York Times, among other media outlets, commenting on the protests; Sick is posting his thoughts on his blog, which has been cited in the media.

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Columbia Journalism Review Coverage of the Iran Elections:

“The situation is certainly not a revolution at this point,” Sick wrote Monday on his blog, “but the main players are faced with the decision of whether to push things to the brink, realizing that it could run out of control and perhaps bring down the entire system of Islamic government.”

In an op-ed published in The New York Times on June 17, Bulliet wrote that the current rash of demonstrations “points to serious trouble in coming years.”  He claims that the conflict is an inevitable result of a generational divide similar to the one that fueled American protests of the war in Vietnam. 
 
Bulliet is a former director of the Middle East Institute and author of The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, among other books. Sick served on the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan. He was the principle White House aide for Iran during the hostage crisis and the Iranian Revolution.
 
Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies, is on leave in France where he is also fielding numerous interview requests from the European press.
 
The expertise of Columbia faculty and other academic specialists may be crucial to understanding how the demonstrations develop in the coming days, as more and more journalists are forced to leave Iran and the flow of information out of the country becomes increasingly limited. Additionally, the Columbia Journalism Review, based at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, is assessing the coverage of Iran, both by the press and individuals using social media.
 
More information about some of Columbia’s experts on Iran and the Persian Gulf may be found here.
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