When Lafayette College alumnus Samuel Martin Jordan 1895 embarked on a missionary appointment to Alborz College in Persia, now Iran, the following 41 years of involvement would capture the minds of the Lafayette community.
Jordan departed in 1898, working under the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions.
Beginning in 1899, Lafayette began sending contributions to the school in a program known to the Lafayette community as “Lafayette-in-Persia.” For almost every year until 1940, the college made a contribution of roughly $400 to $500, over fifteen thousand dollars in modern currency.
These fundraising efforts aimed to engage the entire Lafayette community, with one fundraising pamphlet titled “500 for the Lafayette Work in Persia.”
Over the 41 years, the college also sent a dozen “Lafayette men” to serve as faculty alongside Jordan at the Alborz College in Tehran. An additional alumnus, Charles Pittman 1897, traveled to Persia as an evangelist.
The May 31, 1907, edition of The Lafayette announced the second Lafayette man to travel to Persia, Arthur Byce 1907, would soon be joining Jordan in Persia to work as the science department head. That same article mentioned troubles Lafayette was having with raising funds for their yearly contribution, estimating that around $75 more was needed to reach the $400 goal.
While the efforts in Iran began with the Presbyterian church, the college expanded.
“We are not running a Sunday-school in Tehran, but a regular high school, soon to be a college,” one fundraising pamphlet from around 1920 reads.
“At a time when access to schooling in Iran often depended on your religion, ethnicity, or region, at Alborz, Christians (primarily Armenian and Assyrian), Jews, Muslims (Azeri, Kurdish and Persian), and Zoroastrians studied side by side,” history professor Rachel Goshgarian wrote in an email.
An article from the Jan. 23, 1907, edition of The Lafayette described how the school no longer offered reduced rate tuition or supplies, instead charging 50 cents per month more than was typical for the area as “a very effective way of impressing upon them that ours is the best school in the city.”
The school’s curriculum featured courses including science, ethics, liberal arts, Persian language, English and civic life.
“The students are not trained to be ‘Americans,’” the February 1933 edition of the Lafayette Alumnus magazine reads. “For this reason the department of Persian has been highly developed.”
The same magazine article mentions how graduates were encouraged to remain in Persia to “serve their own land,” an effort which was reportedly successful.
“Its alumni included future ministers, doctors, artists, and scholars,” Goshgarian wrote.
Still, these efforts were not without controversy.
Throughout 1927 and 1928, the Ministry of Education of the Iranian Government made four demands of Alborz College — most notably, for the Presbyterian administration to discontinue Bible curriculum for Muslim students and to begin teaching Islamic religious law.
“On one hand, they promoted literacy, education, and science,” Goshgarian wrote of missionaries in Iran. “On the other, they often undermined local religious practices and imposed American Protestant values that reinforced a sense of cultural superiority. The missionary mindset may have been framed as service, but it also carried echoes of empire.”
Lafayette’s work in Iran would come to an end in 1940 due to complications involving World War II, according to a May 1945 edition of The Lafayette Alumnus.
“Even after the missionaries left, Alborz lived on,” Goshgarian wrote. “Under Iranian leadership and as a nationalized school as of 1940, Alborz continued to thrive, and especially under the school’s legendary principle, the mathematician and mechanical engineer Dr. Mohammad Ali Mojtahedi Gilani.”
“This history isn’t just about Iran,” she wrote. “It’s also about Lafayette and about how ideas, institutions, and empires travel. The story of Alborz College is not only a story of educational ambition; it is also a story of American missionary intervention, entangled with broader histories of imperialism and cultural domination.”
Along with other sources cited and linked, Alborz College of Teheran and Dr. Samuel Martin Jordan Founder and President, was a main source of information for this article.
