The Corruption of the Best: On Ivan Illich

In the fall of 1982, the Austrian-born intellectual and Catholic priest Ivan Illich was invited to deliver the Regents Lectures at the Uni­versity of California, Berkeley. This prestigious engagement looked like the culmination of a longtime outsider’s acceptance by the mainstream academy. As things turned out, though, it brought that tentative dalli­ance to an end. The subject Illich chose for his lectures was controversial then, and remains so now: “gender.” His audience included faculty members from Berkeley’s prominent Women’s Studies program—a field Illich hoped to engage in productive dialogue. But his hopes on this front were disappointed. The fallout from the lectures among academic feminists resembled what we now call a cancellation.