In 1975 Mohsen Sazegara flew to the United States, spent a month at a Washington language academy, and, too late for the University of Texas, enrolled at Chicago's Illinois Institute of Technology. He recounts how the Iranian student Confederation grew from a government-created association after a 1960 protest in Michigan, then split among nationalists, Muslims and communists. He describes the main Muslim student groups, Shariati's influence, and Ebrahim Yazdi's Muslim Students' Association, which mobilized thousands by 1977–78.