IVAN ILLICH was born in 1926. He studied theology and philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome and obtained a doctorate in history at the University of Salzburg. He went to the United States in 1951, where he served as assistant pastor in an Irish-Puerto Rican parish in New York City. From 1956 to 1960 he was vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. Illich was a co-founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC), in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he directed research seminars on ‘Institutional Alternatives in a Technological Society’, with special focus on Latin America until 1976. Ivan Illich’s writings have appeared in many newspapers and journals including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Saturday Review, Esprit, Kursbuch, Siempre, Excelsior de Mexico, America, Commonweal, Les Temps Modernes, Le Monde, Le Nouvel Observateur, The Ecologist, The Guardian and The Lancet. He currently holds professorships at the University of Bremen (Germany) and Penn State University in Pennsylvania.
IRVING KENNETH ZOLA was born in 1935. He studied history and sociology and taught at Harvard University before becoming Professor of Sociology, at Brandeis University. His special subject is Medical Sociology and he has published widely on that subject in the United States and Europe.
JOHN McKNIGHT was born in 1931. Formerly working in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties he is now Professor of Communications Studies and Urban Affairs at Northwestern University in Chicago. He has lectured in the United States, Europe and Latin America and has published many articles on social work.
JONATHAN CAPLAN was born in 1951. After reading law at Downing College, Cambridge, he became a scholar of Gray’s Inn, London. He has worked in the United States for the BBC and contributes articles and legal features to a number of national newspapers and periodicals. He is now a practising lawyer.
HARLEY SHAIKEN was born in 1946. He abandoned his studies at the University of Chicago because ‘I felt that my studies lacked relevance to either my background or the world I saw around me’. He worked first as an unskilled worker and then took an 8,000 hour Machine Repair Apprenticeship at General Motors in Detroit. He has worked two years in a steel mill, five years for a large car manufacturer and five years in a small machine shop. He teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.