Colleagues of Princeton University Scholar Convicted of Spying in Iran Express Shock
Academics and Iran experts said the arrest and punishment of the student, Xiyue Wang, first announced in Iran on Sunday, may chill scholarly ties between the United States
and Iran, subverting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s promise of more openness.
But Mr. Wang’s case, Mr. Carruthers said, shows that "a visitor like
that can be a bargaining chip." Mr. Wang, 37, a naturalized American citizen from China, was arrested in Iran last August while researching Persian history for his doctoral thesis.
Iran’s judiciary, which broke the news of Mr. Wang’s arrest
and punishment on Sunday, said Mr. Wang had entered the country "under the cover of a researcher," had secretly worked for American and British intelligence via a "spider web" of connections and had digitally archived 4,500 documents.
Mr. Wang’s thesis adviser, Professor Stephen Kotkin, strongly defended Mr. Wang’s work in a statement sent via email, describing him as a linguistically gifted doctoral candidate whose research "required field work at multiple sites throughout a vast
and complex region." Mr. Kotkin also implicitly criticized the Iranian judicial authorities, saying they made a colossal misjudgment about what constitutes espionage.
Bruce Carruthers said that This kind of situation makes me wake up in a cold sweat,
By RICK GLADSTONEJULY 17, 2017
Colleagues of an American student from Princeton University who was jailed in Iran on spying charges expressed shock on Monday, calling him a gifted
and innocent history scholar whose ordeal has traumatized his family and community.