GUEST FORUM: RICKY D. CRANO’S “UC IRVINE’S SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES IS SHUTTING DOWN CRITICAL AI RESEARCH”

By Ricky D. Crano

February 25, 2025

I’m a Film and Media Studies Lecturer and the University of California, Irvine (UCI) School of Humanities’ sole dedicated critical-theoretical AI researcher, with nearly twenty years of teaching and research experience under my belt. As an Academic Researcher, I founded and co-direct a Critical Data Studies initiative that has, for the last two and a half years, brought preeminent scholars of data discrimination, automation fantasy, and algorithmic injustice to campus for increasingly essential conversations about techno-colonialism, corporate capture, and compulsory digitality.

Now, I’m being laid off, having been told there’s “no programmatic need” for my experience and expertise. Is it any coincidence that UCI has positioned itself at the cutting edge of ed tech and as a pioneer in the data colonization of higher education? Or that the Dean of Humanities is zealously plugging something called “class chat,” a pricey platform that kicks questions typically fielded by qualified educators to an infamous confabulator who spews carbon like a steam engine and speaks exclusively in diverting clichés?

On February 12, 2025, 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 embarrassing to be the face of a major union action, particularly at this moment of world tumult. Here at Irvine, the university is scrambling to protect its students and its research dollars from the onslaught of the new administration in Washington. Meanwhile, the civic infrastructure of the country and much of the globe is being demolished by a billionaire man-child flying Hitler salutes. And a demented real-estate developer turned reality-TV kingpin wants to extirpate the Palestinian people and turn Gaza into a playground for jet-setting cronies.

Against this sorry backdrop, my small story underscores a broader problematic: with no guarantee of benefit to students, digital tools transfer resources and the power to surveil and hoard data away from instructors toward a tiny elite. As Zeynep Tufecki noted recently in the New York Times, this trend is fast accelerating with Trump and Musk. At UCI, we’re facing more than an unlucky boondoggle, as the Humanities Dean has bought the AI snake oil and revealed himself to be an instrument for the deskilling of academic work, devaluing of the critical role of the humanities, and dehumanization of teaching and learning. Interdisciplinary researchers like me are now being called on to undertake the sordid task of ethics-washing Big Tech while the industry does for higher education what it has done for civic life in the world’s ailing democracies and what Elon Musk’s DOGE is now doing to the federal workforce.

It was a sunny fall morning, shortly before Thanksgiving, when I received the curt 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 inconvenient that the space my research group has opened up for collaborative inquiry into technosolutionism offends the apparent plan to make UCI a strategic vanguard for the larger UC system. Perhaps the idea is that forking over for chatbots will dissolve sundry labor struggles and operational inefficiencies as top administrators cozy up to Orange County-based leaders in the healthcare, biotech, defense-tech, and semiconductor sectors.

On getting my layoff notice, I quickly reached out to my UAW steward; we filed three formal grievances the next day, none of which, in the intervening three months, has received a reply. We have Unfair Labor Practice complaints and a strong wage-theft claim in the works, but when my grievances inevitably go to arbitration it will be to the University’s great advantage that the National Labor Relations Board will be early in the crosshairs of Musk and Trump. While the split appointment I was first given as a spousal hire is somewhat unique, it is symptomatic of the sleights of hand and legalistic acrobatics that universities commonly deploy to carve up careers in teaching and research into disjointed transactions and tasks. Since my position had been created and funded by the Dean’s office itself, the “appropriate funds” phrasing was clearly pretextual—no one is answering our questions or responding to UAW’s formal request for budgetary information. Calls with equity advisors and financial analysts have clarified nothing and resulted only in further bafflement and frustration. I recently learned that the member of the University’s Labor Relations office in charge of my case has left the job, further delaying any procedural path to a just and equitable resolution.

All that said, for three and a half years my appointment was mostly working. As an Academic Researcher, I created a space for essential scholarly conversations 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 public institutions. Last spring, we collaborated, remarkably enough, with the Dean’s office to organize a conference on AI and the Humanities, “The AI Paradigm: From Personhood to Power.” I wrote the grant for funding and drafted the program copy. In consultation with my Critical Data Studies colleagues, I gathered internationally renowned decolonial, antiracist, humanistically minded scholars who spoke to a packed audience about a wide range of topics concerning Big Data in general and the perils generative AI hype. The Dean, much to our chagrin, 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 a 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 publishing on the cultural forms and techno-mediations of fascism and financial capitalism. So I’m something of an expert at what seems to be going on here. The administration has yet to respond to our request for information—that is, they have yet to show us the money. In the meantime, we don’t need to work very hard to imagine the hostility to humanistic Critical Data Studies research and the pedagogy network we have built. It’s important to see this layoff as the tip of the spear. Education by chatbot and layoffs by “lack of appropriate funds” portend a broader and more sweeping attack on the research university: a hollowing out of instruction, the stability of organized labor, and humanistic values writ large. As the “ed” part of higher ed devolves into “user experience” and “interface design,” the university as we know it threatens to succumb to Silicon Valley fantasies about endless growth through automation and ever-new forms of value extraction.

While my lecturing is set to continue for the time being, 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 and enthusiasm for the school’s generative AI literacy priorities, never garnered a reply. So I’m smarting, saddened and stunned, feeling not only 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 conditions that culture and technology researchers have seen a long time coming and which is now impossible to deny: that the corporate auteurs of generative “AI” are totally gassed about authoritarianism in America. Not just directly impacted folks like me, but all of us collectively need to demand answers. As our civic spaces are being transparently demolished, our social norms hurled into reverse, and our educational programs increasingly blandished through automation., how can any public research institution—in the humanities, no less—defund critical AI research? Why shutter the few spaces available for creative, collaborative conversations about technology, culture, and corporate capture? In solidarity, we stand up and fight back.

To share your ideas or offer advice please feel free to comment below (the comments are moderated) or write to the author.

Ricky D. Crano: rcrano@uci.edu