Iran's Student Movement: A Sixty-year Retrospective Iran's post-2009 presidential election "Green" opposition movement has already become the subject of considerable scholarly and political controversy. A central issue of controversy concerns the movement's social base. Both opponents and supporters of the Green Movement often refer to its "middle class" character (Dabashi, 2010 forthcoming). Meanwhile, it is clear that university students are in the forefront of both campus and street protests throughout the country. This conforms to a historical pattern whereby students arguably have been the main social base of radical opposition to the Shah's regime and the Islamic Republic. This paper will offer a historical retrospective on about sixty years of student political activism in Iran. It will build on the author's previous major study of the Iranian student movement during the 1950s-1970s, adding a similar overview of the three post-revolutionary decades. Despite its significance to the history of modern Iran, student political activism remains vastly understudied. In English, it is the subject only of one book (Matin, 2001), partially noted in another (Parsa 1989) and covered in a few articles (Mahdi 1999). Nor can one find major studies of this topic in Persian (Baghi 2001). This is ironic, since abundant evidence points to students as Iran's most politically active social group throughout the post-revolutionary decades, just as they were under the monarchy. The first half of my paper therefore will document the above claim by tracing it in post-revolutionary primary sources, which I have gathered during twelve annual visits to Iran since the mid-1990s. These include the publications of Iran's major student organization, The Bureau of Unity Consolidation (Daftar-e tahkim-e vahdat), daily newspapers (Salam, Hamshahri, Tus, Neshat, Jame'eh, Sharq, Etemad-e Melli), and weekly, monthly or quarterly periodicals (Iran-e Farda, Shahrvand, Payam-e emruz, Cheshmandaz-e Iran, Kian, Adineh, Gozaresh, Rah-e no, Goft-o-gu). Building on this data, the second part of my paper will address several analytical questions regarding the sixty-year span of Iran's student opposition movement. Here, the most obvious approach would be a comparison of the movement during the 1950s-70s with that of the 1980s to 2010. Here, some preliminary generalizations are possible. For example, there is sufficient data to allow a comparison of the social and class background of student activists (or at least their leading members), the movement's dominant strands of political ideology, its organizational structure, and its links to various political trends outside the universities, before and after the revolution.