History
Shahid Beheshti University was founded as the National University of Iran in 1959 by Dr. Ali Sheikholislam only to be the first private university in Iran. The university was originally planned to be devoted to graduate studies. At its opening, it consisted of two schools, Architecture and Urban Planning and Banking and Economics, with just 174 students in total. Soon the School of Literature and Foreign Languages began its life in downtown Tehran. The first graduate academic degree program was the Master's course in the School of Architecture, launched in 1961. In 1962, a new main campus was built in Evin, a suburb in the north of Tehran. Academic offerings expanded as facilities were added. The first PhD course was offered in the School of Economics in 1991.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, the university was home mainly to students coming from well-to-do families of Tehran. However, from the mid-1970s onwards, students from plebeian families in Tehran and other Iranian provincial cities began to infiltrate the student body of the university. Under royal auspices, the university library began to acquire some of the most important collections in the field of Oriental studies and literary classics in French and German. During that period, the university library ranked in importance second in the country only to Aryamehr (later Sharif) University of Technology.
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