In 1982, when Iranian universities and colleges opened their doors to students after the so-called Cultural Revolution, a new group of students was admitted based on affirmative action.  They were coming from very low-income families and from families who had a "martyr" during the 1979 Revolution.  Almost all of them failed in STEM courses in the first semester.  In a class of 40, all of them got zero scores in Physics 101.

To cope with these students, faculty members lowered the level of the courses.  As the academic level plunged, more and more of these students occupied university and college seats.  Some years later, the family members of killed soldiers, the veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, and Basij members were added to the list of groups who could benefit from the affirmative action policy.  These groups became the counter-movement to any anti-authoritarian and anti-totalitarian movements in the universities and elsewhere.

Academia down the toilet

Because of this policy, Iranian higher education went down the toilet.  After four decades of enforcing this policy, cheating in exams is a regular behavior of university students.  Medical misdiagnoses and malpractice are skyrocketing.  Almost no student uses textbooks (they use 20 to 30 pages of notes to get the grades they need to graduate).  You can buy any paper or dissertation you need to submit from people who make and sell them to you.  You can even buy a (fake) diploma from any university in the world.  A couple of Ahmadinejad's Cabinet members had these fake Ph.D.s from Oxford and Cambridge.  The government claims that Iran's nuclear and missile programs are domestic while they buy all the know-how and materials from Pakistan, North Korea, and Western underground markets.  Affirmative action ruined Iranian higher education.

Academic disaster 

When I came to the U.S. for my Ph.D., I witnessed another show of affirmative action and its consequences.  During my graduate school years, experienced faculty members were replaced by members of minorities who could not teach or write and were not able to do research.  Area studies (women studies, Latino studies...), which offer no basic knowledge to the students, replaced core studies in my department (sociology) and the generation of experts in analytical and theoretical sociology was replaced by identity-oriented faculty members who were mainly activists and not scholars.  In only a decade, the whole department's curricula and quality were bombed into rubbles.

Scholar or activist?

Just look at what the affirmative action policy has produced in public and private universities and colleges in the U.S.: mass production of articles and books that repeat anti-Western and anti-"rational discourse of the Enlightenment and modern era."  The main objective is to ruin Western civilization. These materials promote cultural relativism (such as "sharia is as good as human rights charters"), postmodernism (there is no truth), and a race-oriented approach (if you want to know a theory, just look at the race of the author).  The cowardly lefty faculty members actively participated in the process.

In private schools, affirmative action has been ruining both the faculty and the student body.  If you are not familiar with the schools, you can see this in their products.  Almost all junk writers in mainstream media are graduates of Ivy League schools.  They hate their country and praise Chávez, Maduro, and Khamenei.

Diversity from above

The diversification of the left as the core reason for affirmative action in American universities has extended to the point that terrorists and Islamist propagandists are also part of the new norm.  Hossein Mousavian, who was the Islamic Republic of Iran's ambassador in Germany during the Mikonos terror operation (a number of dissident Kurds killed), is now a faculty member at Princeton University.  Hossein Derakhshan, who praises Lebanese Hezb'allah and Islamist regimes, is a fellow at Harvard.  NYU usually invites Iranian Basiji members to give a lecture and present false survey information.  The left's diversity and affirmative action policies logically lend themselves to having Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in the faculty pool; they have fresh ideas to destroy Western civilization and "white privilege."  Almost all Islamists are anti-imperialist, anti-Israel, and pro-SJW. 

Higher education as a chocolate bar

The left, all over the world, looks at higher education as an instrument not to promote science and technology and improve human lives, but to make society more "just" and distribute high status.  The leftists' agenda is about not advancing and boosting human civilization, but promoting tribal causes.  To do this, 1) college is to be for everyone, while it really is not; 2) every voice that is critical of this perspective should be silenced; 3) critiques should be labeled as "white nationalist" and "racist," discouraged from dissenting from this fascist ideology of identity politics; and 4) groups such as Antifa must be welcomed to campuses to terrorize the students and faculty members who do not agree. 

Affirmative action ruined Iran's education.  It is on track to ruin America's, too.