create jobs for its unemployed population, though the results of these efforts have not yet materialized. Consequently, the country remains unable to benefit from its educated diaspora or its pool of unemployed experts at home." History Emigration from Iran is said by one source to have started in earnest with conscription for the Iran–Iraq War. The government's need for fresh troops and the high mortality rate of those troops led to the flight of draft-age Iranian men to other countries. Another factor may have been the Iranian Cultural Revolution, which occurred after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. On 12 June 1980, the Cultural Revolution shut down Iran's higher-education system for over a year with the goal of a complete overhaul. Nonetheless, the flight abroad of educated Iranians was commented on as early as 31 October 1980, when its importance was disparaged by the Iranian revolutionary leader Ruhollah Khomeini: "They say there is a brain drain. Let these decayed brains flee. Do not mourn them, let them pursue their own definitions of being. Is every brain with—what you call—science in it honourable? Shall we sit and mourn the brains that escaped? Shall we worry about these brains fleeing to the US and the UK? Let these brains flee and be replaced by more appropriate brains. Now that they (the Islamic Republic) are filtering, you are sitting worried why they are executing [people]? Why are you discussing these rotten brains of [these] lost people? Why are you questioning Islam? Are they fleeing? To hell with them. Let them flee. They were not scientific brains. All the better. Don't be concerned. They should escape. [Iran] is not a place for them to live any more. These fleeing brains are of no use to us. Let them flee. If you know that this is no place for you, you should flee too." The trend continued during the Iran–Iraq War, and after a post-war relative calm, picked up once again during the unprecedented incursion of the clerical establishment in Iranian universities, the last firm bastion of Iran's reformists. In November 2005, a cleric became chancellor of the University of Tehran, replacing Dr. Faraji-dana, and marking the first time that Iran's clerical establishment replaced traditional academia to head a major academic institution. He has however written several books and has served on the faculty of the College of Law as an expert on Islamic jurisprudence. The lengthy