Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.
A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.
Jain was a technology executive with a front-row seat to how AI was changing business, but he believed AI proficiency was trapped in Silicon Valley. The business world — and the broader world — badly needed “awareness, education, an understanding of the technology for what it is, and a demystification of myths or misinformation about the technology in terms of what it isn’t,” he said.
He first taught the course at Santa Clara University in 2021. That year, one of his colleagues at Meta introduced him to Terry Kramer, faculty director at the UCLA business school’s Easton Technology Management Center, and Heather Felix, the center’s executive director. One reason Jain was attracted to UCLA was the possibility of creating a center dedicated to public intellectual discourse about AI. He “discussed it at length” with Kramer and Felix, he said.
“There isn’t such a disinterested, independent intellectual center of excellence or thought leadership yet in the world for AI,” Jain said. He dreamed of leading that charge. “The mantle of the public intellectual in the field of AI seems to be unclaimed, and it was my desire to sort of fill that void.” Teaching “Management In the Age of AI” would lay the groundwork for such a project at UCLA.
To pitch his course to Kramer and Felix, Jain sent his CV and a full version of the syllabus, including a course description and schedule of each week’s readings. His syllabus was marked with a copyright symbol on the bottom of each page. It read: “Any reproduction of any part of this document without written permission is a violation of copyright law.”
Once approved and launched, the course proved popular, and the university asked Jain to teach it again. But when the university would not fulfill Jain’s requests for things like a personal research assistant and the title of “senior fellow,” he decided not to teach again. When Kramer referenced the need to find another faculty member to teach the AI course, Jain responded that the course was his intellectual property and “not something that I am just going to hand over to a new instructor” — a comment that neither Kramer nor Felix acknowledged in their reply.
UCLA continued the course. They hired another instructor, Cy Khormaee, to teach it.
Jain had crossed paths with Khormaee before. The two Silicon Valley technology executives had met in 2023, when they both spoke at a panel during a conference hosted by UCLA. They reconnected in person at a networking dinner in late 2024, and Khormaee said he was teaching a course at UCLA titled “Management in the Age of AI.”
In Jain’s recollection of the dinner, Khormaee told him that he was having fun teaching the course. The two later had a call to discuss ideas for a startup. It was friendly, Jain recalled, but when the topic of conversation turned toward the UCLA course, he was not happy to hear that his counterpart had kept some of the materials the same. Jain asked him to send over a copy of the syllabus he was using, and Khormaee obliged. (Khormaee did not respond to The Chronicle’s multiple requests for comment.)
To Jain’s naked eye, the similarities were striking. Excluding the parts of the syllabus with boilerplate language about matters like plagiarism and absences, Jain ran Khormaee’s document through plagiarism-detection software. When the software identified several similarities, it was “the first time that I discovered that this is problematic,” Jain said. At the bottom of the page, Khormaee had added his own copyright mark.
In the following months, Jain sought answers on what materials Khormaee continued to use and why UCLA was allowing it. The saga sheds light on a little-discussed gray area in the relationship between instructors and their institutions: namely, whether ownership rights over original scholarship extend to the elements of a single course.
It’s changed a lot. From his roles as a product manager at Amazon, Google, and Twitter, and as an executive at Meta and Uber, Jain has seen how AI has created business issues that rise to the CEO or board level. He distilled all that experience into the course, offering real-world case studies that are “quite rich, quite detailed, and quite novel,” he said. “You can’t really find it in any run-of-the-mill AI course.”
For example: Some brands rely heavily on recommendations from their algorithms to establish relationships with consumers, more than traditional strategies like attentive customer service or eye-catching aesthetics. A good algorithm — powered by good AI — means loyal customers. But “AI is such a fast-moving field,” Jain said, that the textbooks haven’t caught up to feature contemporary examples like that. “Bringing those kinds of snippets, examples, and case studies in the classroom based on my real practice experience is what enriches the course deeply.”
To Jain’s dismay, the syllabus Khormaee provided suggested that the course he’d so carefully crafted — and that he thought belonged to him — was still being taught, without his permission. . While he said he doesn’t have all the information he would need to assert that laws were broken or academic policies violated, Jain wants the university to conduct an investigation. “I remain deeply concerned by the conduct that has taken place and firmly demand that it should be investigated fully,” he said. “The fact that no investigation appears to have taken place is flabbergasting to me.”
By Jain’s assessment, his course materials were used by Khormaee after he left UCLA, including the syllabus and homework assignments. “Those are the things that govern the pedagogy of the course,” he said. He submitted a public-records request in January to UCLA asking for Khormaee’s syllabus, course description, lecture slides, homework assignments, and reading lists used in 2024 and already developed for 2025. The university hasn’t provided those records yet. Jain has a copy of the spring 2024 syllabus Khormaee sent to him, and he obtained the assignments used in 2024 from someone at UCLA. He also obtained a copy of Khormaee’s spring 2025 syllabus.
Jain’s syllabus and the 2024 syllabus are remarkably similar. Khormaee’s course description describes a class with the same themes and goals as Jain’s, but it uses different phrasing. Two sentences are identical, while several others appear to have been slightly edited. (“In this highly applied course, you will practice thinking like a general manager in the Age of AI,” Jain’s syllabus reads. “In this highly applied course you will learn to think like a general manager in the Age of AI,” Khormaee’s says.) Two of the course objectives are identical. And several of Jain’s readings remain on Khormaee’s syllabus. The two instructors’ assignment prompts also describe the same projects, though many are separated into multiple assignments in Khormaee’s syllabus. Khormaee’s syllabus for the following semester — spring 2025 — appears to reword the identical sentences and course objectives. The Chronicle asked UCLA to verify Khormaee’s course materials, but a university spokesperson did not respond.
After Jain discovered that Khormaee was using language and assignments from his syllabus without his permission, he emailed Kramer and Felix, the two Anderson administrators, to share his concerns and say he hoped to reach an amicable resolution. He recalls feeling deeply wronged.
“It’s just not something that is up for grabs,” Jain said. “It’s something that I’ve written and authored. It’s something that I own.”
Over the next few months, Jain shared his grievances with the Anderson dean, UCLA’s interim chancellor, and the compliance officer and provost from the University of California system. He either received no response or was directed to another department. “There was just a general reluctance to look into the matter, which I found very puzzling,” Jain said. “Having different university executives at the highest levels in the university hierarchy pointing at each other circularly about who ought to investigate this appears to be an abdication of their responsibilities to taxpayers who fund the UC to the tune of billions annually,” he said.
He was also communicating with Maria Anguiano, vice chair of the Board of Regents for the University of California system. He wrote to her in an email that “as long as someone, anyone, opens a formal investigation everything will be clear as day for people to see.”
A university spokesperson said UCLA could not comment on the specifics of Jain’s case due to potential privacy concerns but that the Anderson School and UCLA “take issues of academic integrity very seriously.”
But the spokesperson did cite what appears to be the crux of the dispute: the University of California system’s policy on ownership of course materials. It says that while the instructor may own the copyright to their course materials, the university has a fully paid-up, royalty-free, perpetual, and nonexclusive worldwide license to “use and update certain course-approval documents, such as a course description, a statement of learning objectives, and a topical outline, with the aim of maintaining course continuity.”
Was Jain’s syllabus a “course-approval document” that carried a license with it? Jain said if it is, that wasn’t made clear to him. The listed examples of course-approval documents in the policy do not include syllabi — although Jain’s syllabus does include a “course description” and “course objectives.” The policy governs works “produced at, by, or through the University of California”; Jain’s syllabus was crafted well before he was employed at UCLA.
Alex Anderson-Kenney, a field representative at the University Council-American Federation of Teachers union, agrees with Jain on this point. She said that syllabi are “explicitly listed as being course materials” (not “course-approval documents”) in the system policy, meaning the university’s license would not apply.
Anderson-Kenney declined to speak on specifics about Jain’s case since he is no longer employed at UCLA.
But Jain’s experience did prompt the union to investigate “more pervasive issues within the department impacting Unit 18 Faculty,” a group primarily made up of lecturers within the UC system. Anderson-Kenney did not offer specifics about the investigation’s findings but said the union is “continuing to investigate this matter.” Early on in conversations with Jain, UC-AFT relayed his concerns to representatives from the university, she said. “I am not aware if the university has taken any steps to address these concerns or further investigate,” she told The Chronicle.
Jain sent a public-records request to UCLA in January asking for documents related to departmental complaints or investigations regarding faculty members accused of copying, misattributing, improperly citing, or plagiarizing teaching materials in the last five years. The university responded that they could not locate any records.
According to emails shared with The Chronicle, Holly Mendez, a union representative who no longer works at UC-AFT, told the manager of labor relations at UCLA while she was still a representative with the union that UC-AFT is “gravely concerned that the School of Management is actively involved in the theft and dissemination of lecturer intellectual property.” Mendez declined to speak to The Chronicle.
Jain was disappointed because of the lengths he had gone to protect his course materials. He sought clarification about definitions in a patent acknowledgement he was asked to sign, and an employee in the university’s Technology Development Group reassured him that university intellectual property covers works created in the “course and scope” of employment, referring to duties employees perform as a part of their job. After he learned his course materials were used, he looked back at the email exchange and considered it an assurance that a course developed at another university was not considered UCLA’s intellectual property.
In December 2023, when Khormaee messaged Jain on LinkedIn seeking advice about teaching the course, Jain said the course materials were his “proprietary IP” that he does not share. Jain also recommended to Khormaee that the university change the name of the course, saying it was under his copyright protection.
(At the time he was hired, Jain’s copyright was not registered, but copyright exists when a work is created and doesn’t have to be registered. He formally registered his course materials with the U.S. Copyright Office in 2024 after he discovered that Khormaee was using his materials as a “precaution to protect myself,” he said.)
Eventually, the university changed the course name to “Leading in the AI Era.” Notes from the subcommittee that approved the change, obtained by Jain through a public-records request and shared with The Chronicle, say the “new title is requested by new instructor & Easton Center.”
Jain hired a law firm that earlier this year had demanded that the university turn over all of his course materials and remove his work from UCLA’s website, among other things. The university’s legal office has been in touch with Jain’s lawyer, who declined The Chronicle’s request for an interview. “The main thing that we wanted was a lot of the documents to help establish what had happened,” Jain said. “We encountered resistance in that and so those discussions didn’t lead to material progress toward resolving the matter.” The firm also sent similar demands to Khormaee, and the university responded on his behalf.
Policies like UCLA’s are commonly used, though not universally so, to ensure continuity of a course if an instructor leaves, said Michael Madison, a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh. “The University has a legitimate interest in making sure that the course continues to be offered, because the students at that university have a legitimate interest in having access to that knowledge,” he said. (When Jain was considering leaving, Kramer wrote to him that finding another instructor for the course was necessary to “ensure we meet our student needs and advance the strategic imperatives of Anderson.”)
Negotiations over instructional materials usually happen quietly, Madison says.
Jain hopes the university will investigate his concerns to reach a resolution. “That’s just how people should be — they should try and resolve things” he said. “Disputes are not good for anybody.”
