Colleagues of Princeton University Scholar Convicted of Spying in Iran Express Shock<br />Academics and Iran experts said the arrest and punishment of the student, Xiyue Wang, first announced in Iran on Sunday, may chill scholarly ties between the United States<br />and Iran, subverting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s promise of more openness.<br />But Mr. Wang’s case, Mr. Carruthers said, shows that "a visitor like<br />that can be a bargaining chip." Mr. Wang, 37, a naturalized American citizen from China, was arrested in Iran last August while researching Persian history for his doctoral thesis.<br />Iran’s judiciary, which broke the news of Mr. Wang’s arrest<br />and punishment on Sunday, said Mr. Wang had entered the country "under the cover of a researcher," had secretly worked for American and British intelligence via a "spider web" of connections and had digitally archived 4,500 documents.<br />Mr. Wang’s thesis adviser, Professor Stephen Kotkin, strongly defended Mr. Wang’s work in a statement sent via email, describing him as a linguistically gifted doctoral candidate whose research "required field work at multiple sites throughout a vast<br />and complex region." Mr. Kotkin also implicitly criticized the Iranian judicial authorities, saying they made a colossal misjudgment about what constitutes espionage.<br />Bruce Carruthers said that This kind of situation makes me wake up in a cold sweat,<br />By RICK GLADSTONEJULY 17, 2017<br />Colleagues of an American student from Princeton University who was jailed in Iran on spying charges expressed shock on Monday, calling him a gifted<br />and innocent history scholar whose ordeal has traumatized his family and community.
