In his Iranian new year message of March 2011, President Barack Obama pledged the US would “build new avenues for engagement with Iran’s youth, facilitate their ability to study in the United States, and allow Iran’s young people to better interact with the rest of the world”. This was followed by a more liberal US policy on visas for Iranian students and exchange visitors.

Nowhere was the breakthrough more marked than in science, leading some to speak of “science diplomacy”. In cooperation with its Iranian counterpart and with strong support from the US state department, the US National Academy of Sciences promoted engagement across science, engineering and health, organising trips of American Nobel Laureates and presidents of leading US universities to Iran, while the state department encouraged visits by Iranian scholars to scientific roundtables and gatherings in America.



Then, earlier this month came a bombshell. The University of Massachusetts in Amherst (UMass) announced it would bar Iranians from a range of engineering and natural science programmes.

UMass justified the decision as compliance with US sanctions, specifically with the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act of 2012, which excludes citizens of Iran from education in the US if they plan to focus subsequently in Iran on nuclear or energy-related work. A department of homeland security clarification of the law in July 2013 referred to those “seeking to participate in higher education in preparation for a career in Iran’s petroleum, natural gas, nuclear energy, nuclear science, or nuclear engineering fields”.

The reasoning behind the UMass decision was faulty. The blanket ban assumed all Iranian students applying for certain subjects would return to Iran – many do not – and would work in energy, even though nuclear and energy research were not the only focus areas of the UMass departments banning Iranians.

Shortly after the ban was announced, many students, scholars and organisations protested, arguing it undermined American values and violated academic principles that prohibit discrimination on the basis of colour, race, religion, age, sex or nationality. They feared the UMass decision could have a domino effect, with other universities following suit.

Using the #weareallumass hashtag many Twitter users expressed concern. A petition was launched and Facebook page, No to the UMass Educational Ban on Iranian Nationals, was created by UMass students.

The policy also surprised the state department, which had been trying to strengthen science diplomacy with Iran. The federal government is well aware of the Iranian community’s contribution to both science and economy in the US, where statistics suggest Iranians have successfully integrated, with above-average household incomes and successful careers as physicians, professionals and professors. Iranians are among the immigrant groups with the highest rate of business ownership, and have founded or been senior managers in major US companies, including Fortune 500 and Silicon Valley businesses.

Education has been part of this integration. The US is one of the top destinations for Iranians leaving the country to pursue a second degree. Of 50,000 Iranians studying abroad, 8,700 (17%) are in the US, with 82% at post-graduate level, the highest percentage of any nation. While the federal agencies continue to bemoan the shortage of Stem (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) talents and the under-representation of women in science, 75% of Iranian students in the US are enrolled in Stem subjects and a third are women.

Most Iranian students in the US are studying for PhDs and 89% of these want to stay in the US afterwards.



Many become permanent residents, and most Iranian-born permanent residents become US citizens. The rate of naturalisation was 60% in 2000, higher than the average 40%.



Fear of losing such a successful group of immigrants and of undermining science diplomacy may explain why the state department reacted so quickly to the UMass decision, stressing that “US law does not prohibit qualified Iranian nationals coming to the United States for education in science and engineering” and that eligibility for visas was judged case-by-case by the department, not by universities.

On 18 February - after consultation with the state department and facing pressure from its students, faculty, and the general public - UMass decided to reverse the ban. The university had taken a law not intended for their interpretation and wrongly applied it.

But UMass is not the only US entity that has suffered from “over-compliance syndrome”. Kaplan, a US-owned education provider has banned Iranians from Stem courses in Britain, citing US sanctions.

Virginia Commonwealth University operates a softer version of the UMass ban by barring Iranian citizens from graduate courses in mechanical and nuclear engineering and any others “that have nuclear content”.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York, is another university with restrictions on Iranian students, with the institute’s website citing “restrictions by several US agencies” that make it “increasingly difficult…to accept students” who are citizens of, or were born in Cuba, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan or Syria.

In January 2013, the University of Central Florida (UCF) informed one of its faculty, the first author of this article, he was not allowed to co-author a paper with an Iranian collaborator located in Iran. UCF said that writing papers with Iranian co-authors in Iran was a “service” for which he required a licence from the US Treasury Department that would take 7-12 months to process. He had been earlier told by the UCF that under Treasury Department regulations required a licence to take his personal laptop or cell phone to Iran.

The problem over zealous interpretations of sanctions is not confined to education. In 2012, an Apple store in Georgia refused to sell an iPad to an Iranian-American woman who was overheard speaking Farsi with her uncle. Over the past two years, Bank of America has frozen or closed the accounts of many Iranian and Iranian-American customers, claiming this to be “in strict compliance with US sanctions law”, although other US banks have behaved differently.



US sanction laws are complex to follow, especially for those lacking the required legal expertise. Nonetheless, Iranians and Americans continue to write papers together and collaborate on research, and do travel from the US to Iran without obtaining licences for their laptops, cell phones, and digital cameras. Iranian students continue to look to America to further their studies. At least for now, scientists and others from the two nations continue their diplomacy.

Kaveh Madani is a lecturer at the Centre for Environmental Policy of the Imperial College London. Khashayar Nikazmrad is a student of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley