A Critical Reflection on the Influencing Cultural Narratives in Iran’s Higher Education: Eclecticism or Integration

The primary goal of this paper is to examine the contradictions of narratives in Iran’s higher education which have underlain the cultural policies during the last decades. Cultural policies in Iran’s universities have influenced at least three powerful narratives: religious-transcendental, market-dependent, and ideological. The presence and effort to integrate the triple narratives are presently reflected in two strategic documents of transformation in science and technology and Islamic university’s document. Nevertheless, these narratives are structurally antithetical to each other. By emphasising Tellings’ theory of integrating theories, an integrative method has been conducted to demonstrate such a contradiction. The statistical society of this research includes all first and second-handed sources which were available for the author. The results reveal that the foundations of the mentioned narratives are in opposition. These differences have been neglected in higher education’s documents; accordingly, all efforts to integrate the three narratives have led to a paradoxical condition. Confusions in fulfilling cultural responsibilities and the destruction of universities’ autonomy and their dependence on external forces, to name but a few, are among some unintentional consequences of the influence of these paradoxical narratives on universities’ cultural policies.