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Alborz College of Tehran, Dr. Samuel Martin Jordan and the American Faculty: Twentieth-Century Presbyterian Mission Education and Modernism in Iran (Persia)

The article addresses the twentieth-century social and cultural history of Alborz College (The American College of Tehran) in terms of its curricula, mission education, the faculty and Dr. Samuel Jordan, founder and president. The courses taught, from the natural sciences and humanities to business and journalism, shaped the lives and aspirations of so many of the graduates for decades. Of great importance were the academic training and personal lives of Dr. Jordan, Mary Park Jordan, and the American faculty, particularly those graduates from Lafayette College (Easton, Pennsylvania) who served as role models of modernity and generous public service that so enriched the lives of their young Iranian charges and won the hearts and minds of the Alborzi graduates. Our students imbibed liberal ideas, they agitated for reforms, they cooperated with other forward-looking patriots in transforming the medieval despotism of thirty years ago [in 1906] into the modern, progressive democracy today.1 1Samuel M. Jordan, “Constructive Revolutions in Iran,” The Moslem World, xxv (1935): 347. [Jordan] was a strong believer in physical fitness and outdoor sports in a day when a gentlemanly Persian was sedate rather than vigorous.2 2Herrick B. Young, Strange Lands and Wonderful People (New York, 1975), 89. In Iran, American missionaries have been educating Persians since 1830; many middle-aged Persians remember with nostalgia Dr. Jordan, the saintly American who ran a secondary school.3 3Harlan Cleveland, Gerard J. Mangone, and John Clarke Adams, Americans Overseas (New York, 1960), 23. Up in Teheran, the Americans have a factory, which makes men.4 4The expression, which was made by an anonymous Iranian parent, “became Dr. Samuel Jordan's favorite slogan for the work of the Tehran-based Presbyterian American Boys' School which he supervised as principal” (William N. Wysham, “Mr. Chips of Teheran,” Presbyterian Life, 1 November 1952, 13–14). In addition, see Herrick B. Young, Strange Lands and Wonderful People (New York, 1975 ); Yahya Armajani, “Sam Jordan and the Evangelical Ethic in Iran,” in Religious Ferment in Asia, ed. by Robert J. Miller (Lawrence, KS, 1974), 23–36; and Yahya Armajani, “Alborz College,” Encyclopedia Iranica, 1: 821–823. Wysham taught at Alborz College from 1920 to 1928, Young taught business and journalism at Alborz from 1925 to 1935, and Armajani taught ethics and was the Lincoln Hall resident headmaster at Alborz from 1933 to 1940.