UCI’s School of Humanities Is Kicking Its Dedicated Critical AI Researcher to the Curb

Citric Acid is pleased to feature a version of the speech which UCI Lecturer and Academic Researcher Prof. Ricky D. Crano shared with a group of 75 supporters at a recent campus rally on his behalf. Members of the UAW and UC-AFT, campus unions which represent, respectively, Academic Workers and Lecturers attempted to deliver a petition to Humanities Dean Tyrus Miller asking for Crano's full reinstatement, signed by over 300 colleagues, staff, and students. The dean was out, so activists taped it to his office window. 

I’m the UCI School of Humanities’ sole dedicated critical-theoretical AI researcher; I am the founder and co-director of a Critical Data Studies work group that has brought preeminent scholars of data discrimination, automation fantasy, and algorithmic injustice to campus for what are only increasingly essential conversations about the latest updates to techno-colonialism, corporate capture, and compulsory digitality. Now, I’m being laid off. Is it any coincidence that UCI is at the bleeding edge of generative AI imposition in higher ed? Or that the Dean of Humanities is pioneering “class chat,” a tool that kicks the questions a seasoned professor might otherwise answer to a known liar who speaks exclusively in diverting cliches and drinks water by the poolful?

On February 12, my UAW and allied comrades rallied on my behalf. While I’m unspeakably grateful for this incredible show of solidarity, it is nonetheless surreal and somewhat embarrassing to be the face of a major union action, particularly at this moment of regional, national, and global tumult. Here on campus, the university is scrambling to protect both its students and its research dollars from the onslaught of the new administration in Washington. The civic infrastructure of the entire country and much of the globe is being demolished by a billionaire man-child flying Hitler salutes. And a scumbag real-estate developer turned reality-TV kingpin wants to extirpate Palestine and turn Gaza into a playground for his cronies among the jet-setting elite, a possibility that only exists thanks to all the bombs our tax-payer dollars and our tuition dollars supplied to that genocidal project during the previous administration. When we tried to stop those bombs, well, we all know what happened… So I guess I’m glad for this small platform, as my story underscores broader problematic trends across higher ed that will surely accelerate with Trump, Musk, and McMahon behind the wheel: the deskilling of academic work, the devaluation of the humanities, and the dehumanization of teaching and learning. Interdisciplinary humanists like me will be increasingly saddled with the sordid task of ethics-washing Big Tech as it colonizes our most sacred spaces. Under torrential SoCal rain, nearly one hundred fellow researchers and union members marched at UCI to say “NO” to these pernicious trends, to fight back against the hostile defunding of uncaptured critical inquiry into capitalist techno-culture, which includes the university and its favored tools and tactics of value extraction.

It was a sunny fall morning, shortly before Thanksgiving, when I received the curt, cold email announcing my nearly immediate layoff, on account of “lack of appropriate funds”: four magic words that the university seems to think have the power to dissolve a contract running through June, a contract to which I apparently was the only good-faith signatory, and a contract which I, in fact, had every reason to hope would be renewed. It is perhaps unfortunate that the space my group has opened up for collaborative cultural, linguistic, historical, political-economic, and aesthetic interrogation of trending AI mania has run squarely up against the techno-solutionism that the School and the University, in a strategic vanguard role for the larger UC system, naively believe will dissolve their sundry labor struggles and operational inefficiencies as they pursue evermore corporate connections with, in this case, Orange County-based leaders in the healthcare, biotech, defense-tech, and semiconductor sectors.

On getting my layoff notice, I immediately reached out to my UAW steward and, for the first time since arriving at UCI, felt seen, heard, and truly supported. My position was created and funded by the Dean’s office, so the “appropriate funds” phrase was clearly a pretext, and no one is answering our questioning. The UAW’s formal request for budgetary information, filed in November, remains unanswered. Calls with equity advisors and financial analysts have clarified nothing and only resulted in further bafflement and frustration, not only on my part but on theirs too. I’ve recently learned that the member of the Labor Relations office in charge of my case has left the job, leading to further delays in their response to my multiple grievances and further foot-dragging towards a just and equitable resolution. At the end of the day, while my split appointment may be somewhat unique, what’s all too common are the accounting sleights of hand and legalistic acrobatics which the university has deployed to stunt both income and intellectual momentum by carving up would-be careers into series of disjointed transactions and tasks.

That said, until November, it was mostly working for me. In my Academic Researcher position, I’ve created space for essential scholarly conversation around Big Tech, Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence, particularly as they have dialed into and distorted the ostensible missions of higher education. Our group, for example, has been hosting workshops, reading groups, and public lectures seeking to challenge the technofeudalist drift of our most cherished institutions. Last spring, we in fact collaborated with the Dean’s office to organize a conference on AI and the Humanities. We called it “The AI Paradigm: From Personhood to Power.” I named it that, I wrote the grant for funding, and I drafted the program copy. My CDS colleagues and I brought internationally renowned decolonial, antiracist, humanistically minded scholars of the Big Data turn and the swift and unthinking adoption of generative AI by institutions like our own. The Dean brought UCI’s Chief Innovation Officer, a venture capitalist specializing in the monetization of academic research, whose main intersection with humanities comes in the form of project called NarrA.I.tive, which was launched (incredibly!) on the heels of the Hollywood writers’ strike to “harness collective intelligence” through AI-storytelling techniques developed with tight industry “collaboration.”

For about two decades now, I’ve been teaching and researching and publishing on the cultural forms and techno-mediations of fascism and financial capitalism, of which AI is now a prime driver. So I’m something of an expert at what’s going on here. Until the administration responds to our request for information—until they show us the money—we don’t need to work very hard to imagine conspiracies brewing behind the scenes to stamp out all obstacles to their techno-determinist delusions and to defuse the momentum our Critical Data Studies research and pedagogy network has been building. So it’s important to see this layoff for what it is—part of a much broader, sweeping attack on academia as we know it,  an attack on instruction (as if my research and teaching can be so disaggregated!), an attack on working class stability, an attack on genuinely humanistic values, and an attack on the “ed” part of higher ed, reducing learning and thinking to matters of “user experience” and “interface design” as the university swallows whole Silicon Valley fantasies about automation and endless growth through ever new forms of value extraction.

To be clear, I really love the research that I do and teaching the classes that I teach, and I hope to go on doing these things for a very long time. But I’ve been confronted abruptly with the fact that what seemed like an almost dream job was actually an administratively disaggregated position crafted so that each unit could gradually chip away at my standing and my livelihood in more or less silence and with relative ease. As it happens, after two years of teaching hugely popular and culturally significant subject classes in English, I was informed the funding had dried up; I’m still writing recommendation letters for those students. After three years of Anthropology service, I was non-renewed despite a glowing faculty review and excellent student evaluations; they weren’t even going to tell me about this had I not asked at the eleventh hour, and they clearly haven’t told the many majors who’ve asked what course I’m teaching next. I’ve been lucky to pick up an FMS class here and there to patch things together and make ends meet, but now my layoff notice threatens to choke off half of my income, to set a working family back a few pegs, to disrupt and discredit what I will never stop believing is research that is vital to human flourishing, and to stamp out on all fronts any challenge to the UC’s increasingly neoliberalized, technocratic intellectual climate. Most dispiritingly, my personal efforts, dating back to the summer, to reach out to the Dean’s office, with ideas for further developing the School’s generative AI literacy priorities, never garnered a reply. So I’m writing this saddened and stunned, feeling not only the shock of the brazen disregard for contract, but the indignity of being cut loose in total silence, and the apparent ease with which those running our institutions feel they can treat their workers like jetsam whenever the purse strings tighten. My layoff may be but one tiny drop in the bucket, but it’s exemplary of the disinvestment in critical inquiry and instruction that so many of us are struggling to reverse.

Over the last several weeks, the whole world has borne witness to something the better ones among us culture and technology researchers have seen a long time coming and which is now impossibly to deny: that the corporate auteurs of generative “AI” are totally gassed about authoritarianism in America. In other words, this is all of a piece with the big picture trends playing out in the headlines everyday now. Collectively we need to demand answers: As our civic spaces are being transparently demolished, our social norms hurled into reverse, and our educational spaces increasingly blandished through automation, why is UCI’s School of Humanities today so set on defunding critical AI research and shuttering the few spaces available for creative, collaborative conversations about technology, culture, and corporate capture? In solidarity, we stand up and fight back.

Ricky D’Andrea Crano is a critical media and cultural theorist whose teaching and research focuses on data power, algorithmic epistemologies, affective infrastructures, and the environmental and psychodynamic implications of compulsory digitality. He is currently completing a book manuscript titled Network Fascism and the Neoliberal Subject, from Algorithmic Media to Affective Order.