Ivan Illich was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1926. Coming from a family with partly Jewish ancestry, he had to flee to Italy in 1941. In 1942 he began his studies in theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, graduating with honors four years later. He turned down a job offer to officiate Vatican diplomat and worked as an assistant pastor in New York. In 1961, Illich founded the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, a research center that offered courses in language and Latin American culture to American missionaries. The center closed in 1976, after several clashes with the Vatican, which had begun after the publication of Deschooling Society in 1971. The '80s were what Ivan IIlich with great academic activity, and served as professor "Science, Technology and Society" at the State University of Pennsylvania.