This paper examines the pre-revolution’s political activism at AUT with a specific attention to 1976-1979 during which the faculty achieved its objective of autonomy, administrative independence from the Ministry of Education, through strikes and resistance. AUT was the most prestigious engineering university and simultaneously one of the most significant sites of protest against the Pahlavi regime (1925-1979). From its founding in 1966 to the revolution in 1979, despite its formal relationship to the Shah’s royal court, AUT became a highly politicized educational environment. Students and faculty at AUT, in line with other leading institutions of higher education in Iran, had wide-ranging demands across a range of social, economic, and political issues. Their demands and politics radicalized in the early 1970s to include freedom of assembly, academic freedom, freedom of expression, and the overthrow of the Shah’s monarchical regime. During this decade several AUT students, professors and alumni even played leading theoretical and organizational roles in the Marxist and Islamist armed struggle movements against the Shah (Haqshinas, 2020; Ebrahimzadeh, 2021). In this paper, we draw on 1) a variety of archives including archival records held at AUT, and the declassified records obtained from Iran’s Intelligence and Security Organization, and 2) oral histories conducted with former faculty, administration, and students, to historicize the politicization of faculty and students at AUT. We will analyze Iranian engineering students’ and faculty activism against Iran’s growing militarism and authoritarianism, and examine the extent to which student and faculty activism was directed at the state control over the campus life.