Who Can Afford to Refuse? AI, Academic Labor, and the Bifurcation of Higher Education

This paper takes seriously the critiques of AI as a technology that degrades critical thinking, accelerates environmental destruction, and operates within a capitalist logic of extraction and efficiency. Yet it argues that calls to boycott or refuse AI in academic settings risk reproducing the very inequities they claim to resist. Drawing on the 2026 EDUCAUSE report, the AAUP's 2025 report on AI and academic professions, and Elizabeth Losh's analysis in Critical AI, I demonstrate that contingent faculty, roughly 70% of the national instructional workforce, face structural pressures making AI adoption a matter of survival rather than choice. Time is the scarce resource shaping this divide. I situate this analysis in my work co-chairing the AAR's Academic Labor and Contingent Faculty Committee, arguing that a scholarly guild skewing tenure-line must speak to and find solidarity beyond its own membership to raise AI's visibility as an academic labor crisis.