Were you ever afraid to walk to class? Did you ever feel scared while reading a textbook? Have you ever had to carefully select your friends and colleagues out of fear of persecution or, in some cases, imprisonment or death? If you haven\u2019t, you should consider yourself lucky.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose were the freedoms we did not have,\u201d said Mojdeh Rohani, Boston University School of Social Work adjunct professor and BRIDGE coordinator, associate clinical director for the Community of Legal Services and Counseling Center in Cambridge, Mass., and graduate of the Baha’i Institute for Higher Education (BIHE), the institution which has sparked the Education Under Fire movement.<\/p>\n
As social workers, we seek social justice. As members of the Boston University community, an American institution, our lives are based on a philosophy of equal rights\u2014freedom, liberty and justice. We embrace diversity and understand the right to an education. In many international communities, that isn’t the case.<\/p>\n
Today, following a showing of the 30-minute documentary film Education Under Fire<\/em>, the Boston University community opened dialogue with a speaker panel including Ms. Rohani<\/strong>; Jeff Kaufman<\/strong>, writer and director, Education Under Fire<\/em>; Joshua Rubenstein<\/strong>, Northeast regional director, Amnesty International; and Rainn Wilson<\/strong>, activist and actor, popularly known as Dwight Schrute from NBC\u2019s The Office<\/em>.<\/p>\n This event was part of Education Under Fire, a campaign developed, according to its website, to address the Iranian government\u2019s denial of the right to education on ideological and religious grounds. The 30-minute documentary explores the universal right to higher education through the lens of the Bah\u00e1’\u00ed community\u2014a monotheistic religious group drawing its tenets from several global religions\u2014in Iran. It tells the story of the Bah\u00e1’\u00ed Institute for Higher Education (BIHE), a grassroots university system established to educate those whose rights have been violated. The documentary, Education Under Fire<\/em>, focuses on the stories of former students of BIHE. The film is intended to spark conversations on university campuses and underscore the importance of defending the right of every human being to higher education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Were you ever afraid to walk to class? Did you ever feel scared while reading a textbook? Have you ever had to carefully select your friends and colleagues out of fear of persecution or, in some cases, imprisonment or death? If you haven\u2019t, you should consider yourself lucky. \u201cThose were the freedoms we did not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5131,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7435,4057],"tags":[7268,7266,5035,415,7265,1487,7264,7267],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8981"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5131"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8981"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23787,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8981\/revisions\/23787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}