If a government, through its higher education system, tries to train a generation of young graduates whose main goal is to consolidate the foundation bricks of the existing regime by approving and possibly applauding all its policies, such a system is indeed digging its own grave.

Such a regime will be a dead one sooner or later. In order to live, to meet the challenge of our world which its only constant phenomenon is perhaps "change" itself, a higher education system should rather ignite a critical approach within the younger generation. An approach looking for changing the status quo, rather than guarding it, towards ideals. An old lady, a sculptor, a playwright and a philosopher who lectured during our commencement ceremony put this idea under the beautiful title of "Raise a rainbow."

When the big heart of my teacher and friend, Mohammad Basirian, stopped on that fifth day of October 1988, several generations of graduates from University of Tehran lost a genuine, humble, restless patron of human dignity.

Although his official assignment was "Specialty English Course Professor," all his students would agree that he was indeed teaching "how to learn." He was indeed trying to ignite a passion for learning, a critical view towards the status quo. He would shout at a student, he would argue with the bureaucrats, the ones who were taking the safe side of the mighty rulers. He was the one who would act sometimes with brutality with those students who had chosen the easy way by adhering to the existing norms and codes of power.

Years later, after Islamic Revolution, during the Iraqi invasion days, when the very young revolutionary guards (Pasdars) would block the streets and stop the cars and search the trunks and ask meaningless questions, it was he who would shout at them furiously and tell them your enemy is the one who is penetrating your capital city and bombing it every night, not the girls and boys and families traveling in the cars which you stop.

Ten years have passed since the day his heart stopped. He was in his early fifties. When I look back, I realize that he was one of those rare people who tried to take his students to the peaks of life and tried to teach them how to look at life from the top. To ignore the minor differences and tolerate different attitudes; to look at life to see how you can change it. He tried to teach passion for learning.

If there are some of the several generations of his students who happen to read this memorabilia, the graduates of University of Tehran's different faculties during early 1970s, they would agree with me that it would be fair to call him "The Unknown Soldier of Human Dignity. "