A Convivial Scholium Recovered? Illich, the Social Paper Project, and Academic Hacking

• In Event: 60.068 - Exploring Tools, Dreams, and Myth: Learning and Living in a Bureaucratic World

Abstract

Today’s digital processors are the foundations for the new online ecology of computerized scholarship that, in Illich’s words, has “passed the second watershed” and is presently instituting a “radical monopoly” over academic life. While the “open source” publishing of papers, the greater availability of digital libraries of academic thought like Google Scholar, or the rise of MOOCs, can all produce Illichian “first watershed” academic benefits, we hope to examine the ways in which these academic technologies threaten to move the professoriate beyond epimethean limits. We will do so specifically through a critical commentary on an ongoing NEH grant collective scholarly peer review project we are involved with that is taking place at CUNY’s Graduate Center, called “The Social Paper (SP).”

Authors

• Jennifer Stoops, The City University of New York

• Richard V. Kahn, Antioch University Los Angeles