David Curtis Wright, a professor at the University of Calgary, has published an editorial in the Calgary Herald recalling Haleh’s impact as a teacher:

For me, reports of detentions of prominent persons by governments run some danger of becoming routine. But not this one. This time, it’s different — it’s personal and hits home, squarely in the sternum.

I know Haleh Esfandiari. For an hour every weekday during the 1989-1990 academic year, she and Jerome Clinton patiently endeavoured to teach me Farsi (Persian, Iranian) at Princeton…

Haleh means “halo” in Farsi, and she was indeed an angel of a language teacher. I took up Farsi with the purpose of eventually reading 13th-century Persian chronicles of the expansion of the Mongol world empire.

I did not know any other Middle Eastern languages the way most of the other students in our small class did, so I was at a disadvantage with the language’s vocabulary, which includes many loan words from Arabic and also from various Turkic languages…

But Prof. Esfandiari did not pass me by. She neither assumed nor required any previous language work, and she endeavoured with quiet and dignified patience to teach her native tongue…

I well remember her formal and somewhat courtly manner, her pleasant morning greetings, and even the rattle of her keys as every morning she opened the heavy, old-style lockset of the office door on the first floor of Jones Hall…

But now she sits languishing behind a heavy door in the Evin Prison, with no indication that its keys will rattle against it with a pleasant “good morning” heralding her liberation any time soon.