Strengthening the civil society in Iran was the hallmark of President Mohammad Khatami’s reformist government from 1997 to 2005. NGOs were nurtured under the Ministry of the Interior, and student movements and organizations flourished in state and private universities across the country as well as on the national level. Despite the harsh crackdown of political student movements after the events of July 1999, less-political organizations both inside and outside of universities expanded, in many cases gaining control over domains which were for long tightly held by the government. Yet with the change of the political tide and the rise to power of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2005, the glamorous civil society soon perished. Previous research on the Iranian civil society has focused more on political organizations and particularly student movements such as Daftar Tahkim Vahdat, which due to the nature of their cause were subject to crackdown by conservative centers of power even during the Khatami era. This paper however, will examine the case of the less-famous National Assembly of Cultural Student Organizations (Majame’e Kanoun-haye Farhangi-Honari) which came into prominence during the Khatami era and was highly influential on student life in universities across the country. A democratically-elected umbrella student association, Majame’ and its member organizations (Kanoun-haye Farhangi-Honari) were highly influential on the cultural climate of university campuses and student art/entertainment consumption over the last years of Khatami’s government. In many universities, Kanouns took charge of matters and made decisions regarding events on campus which had always been under the direct control of university officials. This period saw the unprecedented rise in the numbers of Hollywood movies screened, and controversial plays and concerts performed on university campuses across Iran. Using in-depth interviews with organization members and leaders, this paper looks into how NGOs were nurtured under Khatami’s government in order to create a pseudo-civil society, and how this civil society quickly faded from the public sphere once governmental support was withdrawn. Instead of looking at political student organizations which were subject to direct crackdown due to the nature of their activities, the paper focuses on cultural organizations which were not considered a direct threat to the new establishment but still shared the former group’s fate soon after. Through this, it hopes to shed light on the relationship between state and civil society in contemporary Iran and the consequences of such a relationship for the democratic process.