Peace and Friendship Studies

My interest is in international relations, but I keep getting drawn into the question of academic integrity, because there doesn’t seem to be much left. This is the case of a professor at Oberlin with a shady past who managed to get tenure and a prestigious chair until he was finally brought down last year.

Mohammad Mahallati is the son of an ayatollah and was Iran’s top diplomat in the late 1980’s. He is credited with helping to end the Iran-Iraq War in 1988. In 2007, he got a job at Oberlin teaching religion, which he used to proselytize Islam. That didn’t bother his institution, nor did the fact that emerged later that he had been involved in covering up a 1988 massacre in Iran. (Mahallati denies that he knew of the massacre; I have not researched it, but it seems unlikely to me that someone of his importance would not have been aware of it.) What finally got him was #MeToo: he had traded sex for grades while at Columbia, as well as having sexual harrassment claims at Oberlin. Apparently he is no longer employed at Oberlin, although the university doesn’t seem to have made any formal statement about his dismissal.

I see two lessons from this. One, people will excuse and overlook problems to get what they want. Oberlin wanted to improve its reputation and promote the idea that there was nothing wrong with Iran. To do this, they ignored Mahallati’s lack of academic credentials and numerous other problems, right up until they could not ignore them any longer — and they they put him in a memory hole, never admitting that they were wrong.

Two, be sceptical of anyone promoting something that sounds obviously good. This guy’s title, “Professor of Peace and Friendship Studies,” is creepy. “Peace Studies” I get: we need to study how to make peace. The addition of “friendship” makes it suspect. Of course friendship is good; who could be against friendship? But what role does friendship have in international relations? Friendship is a feature of interpersonal relationships, which exist on an entirely different level.

Mahallati gave a Ted-X talk on “The astronomical costs of unfriedship” [sic]. This is Orwellian coming from someone who supports a regime that open hates Jews and America. You might think that Mahallati is trying to reform the Iranian regime, but this does not seem to be the case, at least based on accusations from 2021 that he, among other things, had his students create anti-Israeli blogs. Of course, someone could be actively promoting friendship in a sincere way, but I would definitely want to pose tough questions to such a person about how to deal with difficult people and states — bullies and so forth — rather than assuming that they are all goodness and light.