Dear President Peñalver:
I am writing to file a formal complaint concerning the 2026 Iran Lecture Series organized by Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding within the Walsh School of Foreign Service. Georgetown’s own promotional material presents four consecutive speakers, Narges Bajoghli, Sina Azodi, Trita Parsi, and Ali (Mohammad Ali) Kadivar, addressing authoritarianism in Iran, the nuclear issue, Iran’s grand strategy, U.S.-Iran relations, and democracy.[1]
By way of background, I am Lawdan Bazargan, Director of the Alliance Against IRI Apologists (AAIRIA), an Iranian-American advocacy organization that documents and challenges the Islamic Republic’s influence networks, propaganda, and efforts to shape public discourse in Western institutions, particularly academia, media, and policymaking. I am also a former political prisoner who was arrested in Iran at age 16. My brother, Bijan Bazargan, was executed by the Islamic Republic during the 1988 massacre of political prisoners. For me, the consequences of how the Islamic Republic is understood, represented, and confronted are therefore not abstract academic questions.
This is not a detached historical seminar. Georgetown’s event description for the October 1 lecture explicitly asks what Iran’s nuclear program looks like “after the 2026 US-Iran war” and what a future diplomatic agreement with Iran might entail.[2] At a moment when war, deterrence, nuclear proliferation, sanctions, terrorism, human rights, and the future of U.S.-Iran relations are live national-security questions, the intellectual architecture of a policy series at the School of Foreign Service matters.
My objection is not that any of these speakers should be silenced or disinvited. They have every right to speak. My objection is that Georgetown appears to have assembled an entire Iran series from speakers whose public records repeatedly intersect with the same NIAC-centered policy and advocacy ecosystem, while failing to provide comparable representation to serious Iranian voices who fundamentally disagree with that ecosystem’s assumptions and policy prescriptions. That is not robust debate. It risks creating the appearance of consensus where substantial disagreement actually exists.
The documented pattern deserves scrutiny
Trita Parsi. Parsi is not merely a scholar who once appeared at a NIAC event. He is the co-founder and former president of the National Iranian American Council and is now co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.[3] In 2018, a political advertisement paid for by NIAC and signed by Parsi, Nader Hashemi, and Ali Kadivar urged the U.S. government to cease efforts to destabilize Iran, adhere to the JCPOA, and provide economic relief.[4]
Narges Bajoghli. Bajoghli spoke at a 2018 Capitol Hill briefing organized by NIAC on Iranian protests and U.S. policy, and she later signed a 2021 letter published by NIAC urging the incoming Biden administration to return quickly to the JCPOA and ease certain sanctions.[5][6] Johns Hopkins has also described her decade of research among media producers in the IRGC, Basij, and Ansar-e Hezbollah.[7] That research access is academic work and should not be misrepresented as evidence that she is affiliated with those organizations. But it makes the absence of direct, equally serious countervailing perspectives, including former political prisoners, victims’ families, and analysts who view the IRGC and the Islamic Republic through a substantially different lens, even more striking.
Sina Azodi. NIAC’s own April 2024 progress report states that, during its advocacy activity in Washington, it “gathered experts” including Azodi to discuss how to secure a ceasefire and prevent a broader regional war involving Iran.[8] Georgetown has now selected Azodi to address the nuclear question and the shape of a possible post-war diplomatic agreement.[2]
Ali (Mohammad Ali) Kadivar. Kadivar was also a signatory to the 2018 political advertisement paid for by NIAC.[4] At the same time, Boston College describes his scholarship as growing out of his experience as a participant-observer in Iran’s pro-democracy movement.[9] That distinction is important: I am not asserting that Kadivar is an Islamic Republic operative. The concern is the recurring overlap with one policy network and the lack of an equivalent counterweight in Georgetown’s speaker selection.
Nader Hashemi, the center director organizing the series. Hashemi’s documented engagement with NIAC-related programming is longstanding. A U.S. Department of State archive records him as a participant in a 2011 NIAC conference in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, with Trita Parsi presiding.[10] Hashemi also signed a 2020 letter of solidarity with NIAC and appeared on NIAC’s 2024 post-election symposium panel on U.S.-Iran policy and diplomacy.[11][12] Georgetown identifies Hashemi as the director of the Alwaleed Center and an associate professor in the School of Foreign Service.[13]
Taken together, these facts do not establish that every speaker is an agent of the Islamic Republic, and I am not making that allegation. They do establish something Georgetown should be willing to confront directly: every announced speaker has a documented intersection with NIAC or NIAC-sponsored advocacy or programming, and the center director has multiple such intersections over many years. Yet the announced series does not appear to include a comparable set of speakers from the many Iranian-American, dissident, human-rights, national-security, or policy communities that sharply dispute NIAC’s approach to sanctions, deterrence, the JCPOA, the IRGC, or engagement with Tehran.
Why this is more than an academic programming dispute
The School of Foreign Service states that its purpose is to educate future leaders who will make the world safer and that it seeks to enhance the range of perspectives in its curriculum and programming.[14] Georgetown’s president has likewise said that the university should be a place where “diverse people and perspectives are celebrated” and “dialogue thrives.”[15]
At a school whose graduates enter diplomacy, national security, government, journalism, and foreign-policy institutions, systematic omission of competing analyses can have consequences beyond the classroom. The danger is not that students will hear controversial views. They should. The danger is that consequential claims about Iran may be presented repeatedly without direct challenge from informed critics, leaving future decision-makers with a narrower understanding of contested evidence, assumptions, and policy tradeoffs.
A strong foreign-policy education should not teach students what to think about Iran. It should expose them to the strongest competing arguments and force those arguments to survive scrutiny. If a speaker argues that sanctions are counterproductive, students should hear a serious expert explain the case for targeted sanctions and accountability. If a speaker argues for renewed accommodation with Tehran, students should hear from those who believe prior engagement strengthened the Islamic Republic or failed to constrain the IRGC. If a speaker explains the regime’s strategic logic, students should also hear from former political prisoners, victims’ families, human-rights investigators, and scholars who emphasize state repression, transnational threats, and the regime’s ideological institutions.
That is particularly important now, in the immediate aftermath of a U.S.-Iran war, when mistakes of analysis can carry enormous human and strategic costs.[2]
Questions Georgetown should answer
• What criteria were used to select the four speakers for this Iran Lecture Series?
• Why does every announced speaker have a documented intersection with NIAC or NIAC-sponsored programming or advocacy, while no comparable group of speakers representing sharply different Iran-policy perspectives appears in the series?
• Why is Trita Parsi being given a standalone lecture on “Iran’s Grand Strategy and the Future of US-Iran Relations” rather than being placed in a moderated debate with an equally qualified expert who fundamentally disagrees with his policy framework?
• Why are former Iranian political prisoners, families of victims of state violence, human-rights advocates, scholars supportive of targeted accountability measures, and national-security experts with different views on the IRGC, sanctions, deterrence, and the JCPOA absent from the announced lineup?
• Will Georgetown disclose whether any outside organization, donor, institute, or advocacy group participated in proposing, funding, or selecting the speakers for this series?
Please do not misunderstand this complaint as a demand for censorship. I am asking for the opposite. I am asking Georgetown to practice the intellectual pluralism it publicly celebrates. Academic freedom protects the announced speakers. It does not require the university to curate a four-part series from an overlapping policy ecosystem while excluding serious dissenting perspectives.
I respectfully request that Georgetown: (1) publish the selection criteria for this series; (2) expand the series to include credible speakers with materially different perspectives; (3) convert at least some of these events into moderated debates in which competing claims can be tested in the same room; and (4) ensure that future Iran programming includes voices from former political prisoners, victims’ families, human-rights advocates, and national-security and policy experts who challenge the assumptions represented in the current lineup.
Georgetown is free to invite Trita Parsi, Narges Bajoghli, Sina Azodi, and Ali Kadivar. The question is why a university that emphasizes dialogue and diverse perspectives would be reluctant to place their arguments beside the strongest informed arguments against them. If Georgetown is confident in the intellectual strength of the views being presented, there should be no reason to shield those views from serious challenge.
At this moment, Iran deserves more than a curated conversation. Georgetown’s students, and the policymakers they may become, deserve the full debate.
Sincerely,
Lawdan Bazargan
Director, AAIRIA
