For Rowan University president, the protests in Iran are personal

What wells inside him as he watches riot police move against protesters in Iran, said Ali Houshmand, is anger.

Outrage and disgust toward the regime that controls his homeland, where security forces are violently putting down demonstrations that have erupted after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.

She died Sept. 16 after being arrested by the morality police for violating the law that requires women to cover their hair with a hijab, or headscarf.

Now her face and fate has become the driving force behind women-led protests in cities around the globe, and for the growing emotional support and concern that reaches all the way to Glassboro, N.J., where Houshmand, who immigrated to the U.S. as a young man, is president of Rowan University.

Perhaps his position offers a small platform, he said in an interview. And yes, perhaps his speaking out could cause his nine siblings in Iran to be harmed or harassed.

“But what is the alternative? For me to be quiet? Is that really a choice? This is not about me or my family, this is a much bigger issue,” he said. “The majority of people in Iran have become absolutely sick and disgusted with a regime that projects a very dark and rigid and restrictive lifestyle for everyone. Women are treated horribly.”

He sent a university-wide message to the Rowan community on Friday, urging them to back the Iranian people as they stand against an aggressor.

Houshmand, 67, grew up in an Iran ruled by the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a pro-West dictator who jailed and tortured dissidents and opponents by the thousands.

It was a cosmopolitan society where reforms put millions more children in school and doubled the adult literacy rate, and women secured the right to vote and run in parliamentary elections, a Brookings Institution study found.

Houshmand’s family lived in poverty in Tehran, the capital. Neither of his parents could read. Neither he nor his nine brothers and sisters had enough food or clothes.

His father supported the family by collecting water in jugs and selling it to those who had no plumbing. He later ran a small grocery store, and as a boy Houshmand worked with him, before and after school.

His chance for a different life came at 20, after military conscription, when the Army offered to let him go abroad to finish high school and enter college. His brothers gave him $70 and a one-way ticket to London.

The following week, Houshmand was working at a KFC, earning 50 pence an hour.

That was 1975, four years before the Islamic Revolution would upend Iran. Houshmand would go on to earn a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a master’s in statistics from the University of Essex in England, then get master’s and doctoral degrees in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

In 1997 he became a U.S. citizen.

He was a faculty member at the University of Cincinnati, later moved to Drexel University, and in 2006 became provost at Rowan. In 2012 he was named president of the university, which has evolved from a teacher-preparation college to a nationally ranked, comprehensive research university. It teaches nearly 23,000 students in classes held online and at campuses in Glassboro, Camden, and Stratford.

As a younger man, Houshmand watched from abroad as the shah was overthrown, he and his friends cheering the dictator’s exile.

“We were all anti-Shah,” he said. “We wanted to be revolutionaries. We didn’t realize our entire lives were being taken away.”

The revolution installed a Muslim theocracy that was trailed by violence and defined by virulent anti-Americanism. Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took more than 50 American diplomats hostage, holding them for 444 days, a confrontation that helped make Jimmy Carter a one-term president.

Today the two countries remain bitter enemies, even as more Iranian people move to the United States.

About 385,000 have immigrated, many during the revolution or the subsequent Iran-Iraq war. Roughly another 200,000 people in the U.S. report Iranian ancestry.

A third of all Iranian immigrants live in the Los Angeles area. The Philadelphia region is home to about 4,200 who immigrated or have ancestry.

Today in Iran, a movement that began as a few demonstrations over the death of one person has grown into big, anti-government rallies in at least 40 cities. Women are burning their hijabs in bonfires and cutting off their hair as a sign of resistance and solidarity.

The state-controlled media report that at least 35 people have been killed in clashes.

Iranian authorities said Amini died after falling into a coma as she waited among others who were arrested by the morality police, which enforce strict rules requiring women to cover their hair and wear loose-fitting clothes in public.

“This regime is not one that can be reformed. It’s not in its nature,” Houshmand said. “The alternative is regime change. And I don’t mean sending arms. I mean the decision of the Iranian community. Truly declare globally that the global community supports the Iranian people.”

A big difference between 1979 and now, he noted, is the potential to rally international support, propelled by social media and by a global community ready to advocate for human rights and freedom.

“Honestly,” he said, “if you look at the country of 85 million people, the overwhelming majority have nothing to do with the [leadership]. And nothing to do with this system. They want a dignified life. They want schooling for their children. They love the countries of the world. And they’re suffering.”