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The purpose of this paper is to clarify the role of academia in broader society. What is academia’s role beyond being a business and providing qualified professionals to other businesses? What kind of organization and ethos is consistent with academia’s proper role in society, considered as a higher-order cognitive system?

Society as a whole is modeled as a viable system, with subsystems dedicated to self-production in the here and now (systems 1-3) and subsystems engaged in exploring the outside and future of the system and in consolidating an identity and an ethos (systems 4 and 5). The role, ethos and proper organization of academia are derived from this model and from cybernetic considerations on the proper architecture of system 4 and system 5 cognitive systems.

To fulfill its role as part of society’s system 4 and system 5, academia must include areas that are sometimes considered redundant or an expensive luxury, such as the humanities or basic research. The humanities must strive to catalyze broad community participation as part of their contribution to system 5 and must strive to produce bridge languages between communities and disciplines to increase the connectivity of the World Brain. The publish-or-perish ethos of academia must be replaced by an erotic spirituality, understood as desire for otherness.

This paper integrates broad philosophical considerations on the role of academia with the use of cybernetic models of viable systems and of distributed cognition, yielding practical guidelines for the organization of academia.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a model of education that is non-reproductive; that is, productive of non-trivial machines. The reason for this is the postulate that society’s main problems are second-order deficiencies, which cannot be fixed by doing what we do better or more intensely, but rather by changing what we do.

This paper proposes several guidelines for non-reproductive education based on Von Foerster’s concept of a non-trivial machine and of legitimate questions, and Ashby’s law of requisite variety. The ideas presented are corollaries and the result of a philosophical fleshing-out of said concepts and laws.

In order to have a non-reproductive education, it is necessary to limit the role of central control and promote self-evaluation in education at every level of recursion: that is, in the relationship between state and educational institutions, educational institutions and teachers, teacher and students and students as evaluators of themselves.

First, the concept of genuine self-evaluation is proposed, to distinguish this from what is currently called self-evaluation; which, it is shown, is not truly so. Second, the concept of authentic research is proposed, as distinguished from original research. This is useful for seeing how legitimate questions work at all levels of education. Third, a number of relationships between cybernetics and philosophical thought are established. Fourth, a model for non-reproductive education is proposed.