The most vital thing we have to offer to the world today is not our dollars but the American spirit of progress, a Tuesday Series audience was told at Stanford last night by Prof. Robert Gulick, University of California authority on Iran.

Gulick’s topic was the present oil dispute between Iran and Great Britain. He has traveled extensively in Iran, met its leaders and lived in the country.

Crux of the oil problem, he said, is that “the Persians want the British off their back. The dispute stems from the desire of the Persians to be master in their own house.”

The country is experiencing a resurgence of the nationalism that has swept through other areas of the world, said Gulick.

He noted that strikes had been taking place around Abadan, where the conditions of the Iranian oil workers are better than elsewhere in the country.

“But nationalist sentiment cannot be stilled by economic concessions alone”, he said.

He sketched in the background of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company of which the controlling shares are owned by the British government. There is no Persian director on the board. The company has a contract to operate oil concessions over 10,0000 square miles in Iran which does not expire until 1993, and the British position is that Iran cannot legally terminate the agreement until then, under a clause in the contract.

In March of this year, a Moslem fanatic assassinated Premier Ali Razmara, who opposed nationalization of the wells on the grounds that Iran lacks the technicians to operate them and market the oil.

(The company has offered Iran a profit sharing agreement to replace or supplement the present royalties payments, but Iran will not accept it.)

The Iranians claim their royalties are considerably less than those paid the Iraqi or Venezuelan governments by other oil companies.

There is conviction among the Iranian people that domination is the root of the country’s troubles, according to Gulick.

“There is a feeling of desperation that any change would be for the better.”

Ninety per cent of the people live in dire poverty, he said. There is no decent housing, and even Teheran, the capital, does not have a good water system. Nowhere can water be drunk safely straight from the tap.

Infant mortality is very high, and about 80 per cent of the people are illiterate, he said. Landlordism exists in a worse form than perhaps anywhere else.

“It is sharecropping with a vengeance,” he said. “The tenant gets one share and anything else he can steel or hide from the landlord.”

Under the circumstances, the Iranian people are a ready target of Soviet propaganda about “the working man’s paradise” that is relayed to them by radio and the Soviet -sponsored newspapers. And Soviet Russia is their northern neighbor, Gulick reminded his audience.

Gulick, who was highly critical of the British government’s stand in the oil dispute, said that at no time has the present premier, Dr. Mossadegh, threatened expropriation of the wells.

“From the start, he and his associates have stated their government was prepared to give fair compensation,” he stated.

The dispute, as he sees it, is part of the whole problem of underdeveloped areas all over the world, the problem attacked in President Truman’s Point Four program.

“Co-partnership is the key to the problem of economic development,” Gulick declared.