Neda Nobari’s decision to yank her endowment from an Iranian studies program at San Francisco State University was announced months ago, but the timing of its closure couldn’t be worse.
Nobari is the founder of MOZAIK, a philanthropy nonprofit that says it has given more than $12 million to 500 artists, many of them women, in more than 20 countries, especially Iran. But last year, she began to express misgivings about her funding of SFSU’s Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies, said Persis Karim, the program’s director.
The center doesn’t offer a degree. Instead, since its founding in 2017, with $5 million from Nobari, it has served as an intellectual beacon at SFSU. Through programs, lectures, and recently, a documentary film, it has researched and highlighted contributions of the Iranian diaspora since the 1979 revolution. In 2023, the center collaborated with MOZAIK on the Future Art Writers Award, focusing on works about the struggle for freedom in Iran. Karim served as a juror.
California was a natural choice for the center as the state is home to the largest population of Iranians outside Iran, Karim said. (UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies estimates that about 293,000 Iranian-Americans live in California, but Karim believes that about one million first- and second-generation Iranians live in the state.) The center found a home at SFSU because Nobari studied computer science at the school; in 2020 she was named the university’s alumna of the year, and inducted into its hall of fame.
In a dramatic about-face, the Iranian-American businesswoman’s misgivings hardened into a decision to redirect her endowment entirely. On Monday, SFSU will pull the plug on the center, dimming a source of research and intellectual curiosity unique not just in the U.S. but around the world, and which set SFSU apart.
‘Neda has changed her mind’
Karim said she’s not received an explanation from Nobari. The most she got, she said, was from SFSU’s vice president for development, who called her into his office and told her, “Neda has changed her mind.”
“And that was it,” Karim said. “Nobody wanted to talk to me about it.”
Karim knows Nobari personally, “and that’s why I feel deeply betrayed,” she said. “When I requested a meeting, she said she didn't want to speak to me.”
Nobari didn’t respond to requests for comment sent to MOZAIK and SFSU.
What is clear to Karim is that the work the center has undertaken is more critical than ever. Its shuttering coincides with a decision by the U.S. to underwrite Israel’s military attack on Iran, followed by its own bombing of the country. Karim said the campaign has been accompanied by the familiar vilification of Iranians, which they’ve lived with in the U.S. since at least the hostage crisis almost half a century ago. Since then, Iran has continually been portrayed by American officials as a global threat and enemy to U.S. interests.
Iranians were smeared when President George W. Bush included the country in his “axis of evil,” and again when Trump added Iran to his travel ban in his first term, and yet again in his second travel ban.
“The media contributes to the narrative about Arabs and Iranians by only focusing on the crisis, and by never understanding what it is to live through these moments when somebody like Laura Loomer posts there are two million Iranians in sleeper cells, and says everybody should arm themselves against them,” Karim said, referring to the far-right activist and conspiracy theorist. “We paid for it for years, and we’re paying for it again.”
A ‘schizophrenic existence’
Karim’s role as ambassador for Iranian culture was on full display Tuesday evening at the Sausalito Center for the Arts, where she screened The Dawn Is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life. The documentary, which she co-directed and produced, weaves the stories of Iranian immigrants in the Bay Area to explain modern Iran.
One of the narratives is a heart-breaking love story about Hanif Sadr, the chef at Komaaj in the Mission. Iranian food plays an important supporting role. Besides making you hungry, its preparation in the film is another example, alongside theater and fine art, of the complex dimensions of Iranian culture that Americans rarely see.
The film reveals the psychic pain Iranians endure, what Karim describes as the “schizophrenic existence” of hating the various oppressions of the theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran, while simultaneously being sickened by it being bombed.
Afterward, Karim took a question from an audience member about Trump’s recent suggestion that the U.S. might once again pursue regime change in Iran, an idea the president cleverly couched as “MIGA” — Make Iran Great Again. The term elicited a collective groan.
“It’s so important that we don’t equate a government with its people — we wouldn’t want that, would we?” Karim told the audience.
The ‘repurposing’ of an endowment
The closing of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies is symptomatic of a bigger challenge at SFSU, which has been battered by a feedback loop of declining enrollment, budget cuts, layoffs, a thinning curriculum, and, as previously reported by Gazetteer, internal doubts about how the university can reinvent itself. The humanities and ethnic studies are under not only financial pressure but attacks by the Trump administration.
SFSU’s official explanation for the center’s closing, which in the end Karim said came as a surprise, is that Nobari is “repurposing” her endowment to support low-income students’ pursuit of science, technology, engineering or mathematics, or STEM — the fields that, Nobari said in a university statement, “are close to my heart.”
But the scholarship of Iran at SFSU was also clearly dear to her, at least up to a point. Nobari emigrated from Iran in 1978, right around the revolution. She earned a master’s from Dartmouth College, with a focus on a subject that would be familiar to the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies: the cultural identity of Iranian-American women. She went on to serve as a director of women’s fashion brand Bebe Stores Inc.
In a separate statement in March provided by SFSU, Nobari expressed her gratitude to Karim and her staff. “The difficult decision to repurpose my endowment was not, by any means, intended to diminish the impact of the Center as a community space and research hub,” Nobari wrote. Instead, she said, it was driven by the need to lower “financial barriers” students face “at a time of significant budget restrictions.”
SFSU spokesman Kent Bravo said in an email that students can continue to engage with Iranian culture through the university’s Persian Studies Program and the Iranian Student Association.
A ‘persistent scholar and artist’
But Karim argues there’s no shortage of financial and academic support for STEM coursework. She’s critical of SFSU, and Nobari, for caving to a careerist curriculum, and the Trump administration’s goal of homogenizing education, to push students to “get a job, and be another cog in the wheel, and not actually try to solve things.”
“Any of us who teach very critically about what the U.S. is doing, both to its own population, but also abroad, feel kind of beaten down by this moment and silenced,” Karim said. “I really see this as a war on young people’s future — to be able to solve critical problems like racism and climate change.”
In an email to Gazetteer, Abbas Milani, director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, described Karim as a “persistent scholar and artist.” He added that “the closure of any program that studies any aspect of Iran with scholarly rigor and impartiality is a sad day.”
The program isn’t the only thing leaving SFSU. Karim, who said she has taught in the California State University system for 25 years, said she will retire at the end of August. SFSU is not only “shrinking the university, but also the shrinking of the vision of the university,” Karim said.
“I have no aspirations to continue teaching in a climate that is so hostile to ideas and freedom,” she said.
