We gather today —not in sorrow, but with cautious relief— to mark the passing of the CCSU Polytechnic Vanity Project, a costly administrative hallucination that briefly mistook itself for the future of public higher education.
The exact time of death remains uncertain. For months, the project was kept alive by PowerPoint, executive fiat, and repeated infusions of the word innovation. But when a long-deferred accounting of numerous allegations of misconduct and institutional intimidation finally caught up with the mastermind who championed it —former CCSU President Zulma Toro— the patient’s condition deteriorated rapidly. Her sudden retreat from public scrutiny coincided with the collapse of her signature rebrand.
The official cause of death: prolonged exposure to reality, complicated by an unexpected outbreak of democratic resistance.
The polytechnic project was conceived in executive isolation and unveiled as a miraculous institutional upgrade. No one had asked for it, but that was apparently further proof of its visionary character. Shared governance, we were assured, would only slow the installation.
From the beginning, the project displayed the classic symptoms of administrative grandiosity: acute slogan production, chronic consultant dependence, compulsive rebranding, and a stubborn inability to distinguish a public university from a defense-industry trade show. Its architects promised to prepare students for “the jobs of tomorrow,” apparently by redesigning the university around whichever Big Tech companies, law-enforcement agencies, and military contractors already controlled today.
Every institutional problem came with the same prescription: more technology. Declining morale? Add artificial intelligence. Faculty dissent? Apply predictive analytics. Workplace-bullying allegations? Reboot the logo. A university community demanding a voice in its own future? Clearly a legacy-system compatibility issue.
The project’s “ethical AI” campaign was especially touching. Students would be taught to use powerful technologies responsibly while administrators placed no meaningful ethical limits on their own authority, partnerships, surveillance ambitions, or conduct. Ethics, under this arrangement, was something management uploaded to the curriculum and deleted from the executive suite.
Behind the polished language sat a much uglier machine. This promised digital future depended on industries built through mass data extraction, environmental destruction, labor automation, military contracting, racialized surveillance, deportation systems, and increasingly autonomous forms of state violence. Technologies already used to classify, track, target, and control human beings were repackaged as an educational identity.
And this was more than an uncritical alliance with a rogue technology. Even some of artificial intelligence’s leading architects are openly warning that the gleaming machine being sold as humanity’s inevitable future may already be drafting humanity’s obituary. Apparently, nothing says student-centered public education like fastening the university’s future to a possible extinction machine.
This was called transformation.
By transformation, management appeared to mean transforming students into workforce inputs, faculty into compliance problems, scholarship into product development, and the campus into a demonstration site for corporate technology. The university’s human beings would remain temporarily, one assumed, until a future system update eliminated the inefficiency.
Unfortunately for the project, the humans noticed.
They noticed that inevitable often means already decided without you. They noticed that innovation had become a password granting administrators access to decisions they could not defend democratically. And they noticed that a proposal supposedly devoted to the future relied on one of the oldest management systems in existence: command, intimidate, marginalize, repeat.
The calculations had omitted one troublesome variable. A university is not programmable software. Its intellectual life cannot be generated by executive prompt. Its consent cannot be simulated. And its people could not be dragged into the recycle bin when they rejected Toro’s preferred brand identity.
We offer no tears for the machine.
In lieu of flowers, mourners may send unanswered governance questions, expired consulting contracts, or lightly used copies of Ethics for Everyone Else. A memorial slideshow will not be shown. The campus has endured enough slides.
The project’s fatal defect was never poor messaging. It was not rolled out badly, misunderstood by faculty, or sabotaged by people insufficiently excited about tomorrow. Its central logic was defective. It treated democratic participation as an obstacle, public education as an underperforming asset, and corporate-military alignment as historical progress.
Ethical bankruptcy cannot be debugged with cleaner code. Institutional bullying cannot be concealed beneath a technological upgrade. No amount of technological glitter can turn executive vanity into a public mission.
Good riddance to the Polytechnic AI Vanity Project—undone by the messy human reality it tried to automate away.
But an obituary alone will not do. The collapse of this digital smoke screen must clear the way for genuine institutional change. A public university belongs to its students, educators, staff, and surrounding communities—not to an isolated executive, a fleet of consultants, or defense contractors shopping for publicly subsidized laboratories and workers.
Progress cannot be calculated by an algorithm. Institutional virtue cannot be manufactured through branding. Innovation imposed without democratic consent is simply coercion wearing a lanyard.
Now comes the harder work: dismantling the culture of fear, restoring meaningful shared governance, rejecting the corporate-military capture of public education, and rebuilding the university around the people whose labor, knowledge, relationships, and collective struggle actually keep it alive.
The machine is dead.
Long live the truly public university.
Timothy Scott is an Associate Professor of Social Work at Central Connecticut State University, a tech industry researcher, and the author of the book, Schooling for Silicon Valley.