The Islamic Azad University was founded by Hashemi Rafsanjani, a cleric who was in the past the first speaker of the Majlis, or Parliament, of Iran's postrevolutionary government. He served as president of Iran from 1989 to 1997 and ran for re-election in 2005, when he was defeated by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the two decades after Azad was founded, the university has evolved into an education behemoth. It now enrolls 58 percent of the country's university students. With more than 40,000 academic-staff members and 1.3-million students at more than 360 locations in Iran and a handful of overseas branches, Azad makes a convincing claim to be the world's largest university. This article describes how the Islamic Azad University's reach and its affiliation with the wealthy and politically powerful Rafsanjani clan in Iran had made it a lightning rod for controversy.