Composing a Life

concerns of others about more gradual transitions and appropriate technologies.
    On the Hamadan project, these two pulls were very obvious. The ministry had assigned the university a site on a hilltop separate from and above the city, perfect for gleaming new buildings insulated from the life of the city, but the architect wanted to build in an old caravanserai in the bazaar, where students would be in constant contact with traditional merchants and artisans. Most serious of all was the fact that the university was really a marriage of two projects developed separately: one was for a populist university, rooted in the traditional sectors; the other was for a Francophone university. At that time, Iran already had several English-language institutions and one emphasizing German, but there was no university based on close current collaboration with France—even though the entire Iranian educational system, with its emphasis on memorization, hierarchy, and competitive examination, with the University of Tehran at the center, had originally been modeled on the French system.
    When I had taught earlier at the University of Tehran, I would bring first an American and then an Iranian mother-infant pair into the classroom for observation, to give students a heightened sense of how early and deeply children are shaped to different cultural patterns. As word spread around the campus of this strange event, I could see a succession of eyes pressed to the judas window in the doorway. One year, a member of the class sat ramrod straight and looked out the window for an hour and a half, unable to accept something so trivial as a ten-month-old infant as part of a university lecture. I knew quite clearly, then, the impediments to constructing an educational system on observation rather than authority. Given the historical role of French culture in Iran, collaboration with France was precisely the worse context for this effort. But still, we hoped something would get across.
    We were caught in a contradiction, a milder version of the kind of contradiction my father and his colleagues in the study of schizophrenia called a double bind, the requirement that we be both French and not French. The essence of that double bind for me was that I was not supposed to exist. All the Iranians in the project had had a portion of their education in French institutions. Although they were convinced of the inappropriateness of the French model, they could pass as Francophiles. I learned to prefer having my ideas adopted to getting credit for them; I would write informal memoranda that would simply be absorbed into my colleagues’ reports for outside circulation. Only once was I publicly included in a gathering of the planning group. I sat demurely opposite Prime Minister Hoveyda at a formal luncheon, as invisible as that infant in the Tehran classroom until the very end, when large and expensive cigars were passed. He suddenly looked straight at me and said, in English, “Of course you won’t want one of those.”
    In the seventies, an Iranian university was attempting to develop a working relationship with Harvard. That relationship was finally declined by Harvard’s president, who was quoted to me as saying, “I don’t want to lose my virginity on that one.” An interesting metaphor. At the simplest level, it was a statement that the collaboration was likely to lead to embarrassment and disillusionment, better to be avoided. At the next level, it could have been an acknowledgment that any such collaboration, like a marriage, would involve a necessary loss of innocence by both parties and the gradual construction of trust in a partner who is never all that one hoped or believed and yet who is someone worth caring about in ways that yesterday one was too simple to imagine. Any collaboration with the shah’s Iran was a mixed blessing, but responsible adult participation, like adult sexuality, requires an end to innocence, metaphorical or otherwise, and an acceptance of ambiguity.
    There were achievements in those years that still make us feel that our efforts were worthwhile, and odds and ends of our work survive. Some students keep in touch, a few colleagues carry on with a changed sense of what is possible. A portion of our vision for Hamadan survives in the remodeled section of the bazaar, but now it is part of a more radical turning back toward the past. Barkev’s institution, the Iran Center for Management Studies, was taken over for the