TEHRAN, April 8 (Xinhua) -- Debris litters the floor. Potted plants are muffled in dust. A jagged crack runs up the wall, exposing the bricks beneath.
In that room, amid the reverberations of blasts, Alireza Zarei, head of the IT Center at Tehran's Sharif University of Technology, continues to teach.
That was what Xinhua reporters saw one day after a U.S.-Israeli airstrike hit the university, one of Iran's leading scientific institutions, badly damaging the IT Center building and a nearby gas substation by the campus mosque.
Parts of the campus have been reduced to rubble. Scattered debris, twisted steel rebars, and the exposed skeletons of buildings make the scene look less like a university than a battlefield.
Yet even amid such ruins, the place remains unmistakably academic. Textbooks and documents lie scattered among broken equipment. And above all, there are the steady, resolute voices of teachers carrying on their lessons.
Zarei is one of them. As U.S. and Israeli strikes continue, many students can no longer make it to campus. Unwilling to let them fall behind, Zarei has begun giving special online algorithms classes for graduate students, right in the very classroom where they once sat together, even though it has now been reduced to a scene of wreckage.
To Masoud Tajrishi, president of the university, every part of the campus was once familiar. But as he walked reporters through the damage in the aftermath of the bombing, even he had to stop from time to time to identify what used to stand there.
"I ask you and I expect that you do not see this destruction as decline or weakness," Tajrishi told reporters, but rather as a manifestation of "the enemy's hostility" toward Iran's scientific and technological progress.
"We, the universities, are moving hand in hand towards this great victory," he added. "We will build this country again."
Sharif University of Technology was not the first educational institution to be struck in recent U.S. and Israeli attacks.
On Saturday, Iranian Minister of Science, Research and Technology Hossein Simaei-Sarraf said over 30 Iranian universities had been directly attacked by the United States and Israel since the war began in late February.
Five university professors and more than 60 students had been killed in the strikes, added Simaei-Sarraf, describing attacks on Iranian infrastructure as "crimes against humanity."
In the middle of the campus tour, multiple loud explosions sent the crowd into panic, while intercepted projectiles streaked across the sky.
Standing before a national flag fluttering beside a shattered podium, Tajrishi spoke proudly of the university's progress in computer science and artificial intelligence.
"The main reason the enemy targeted this sensitive infrastructure was that they did not want us to gain access to this technology," he said, adding that many Iranians abroad have contacted the university, offering to help fund its restoration.
To the foreign attacks, said Tajrishi, Iranian scholars will respond in their own way -- in the arena of science and knowledge, just as others are answering "in the streets" and "on the battlefield."
For now, though, the clearest response is simpler: in a bombed-out classroom, amid dust and broken walls, a teacher opens his laptop and begins again. ■
