It might seem that critical theory, which often probes the complex conditions of social life, is no longer necessary when crises are already on the surface and appear too urgent for thought. But if crises require new modes of researching and teaching, then critical theory has historically offered precisely that—from Marx’s critique of political economy following the failed 1840s social movements, through the new European focus on mass media during and after the rise of German fascism in the 1930s, to students’ creation of ethnic and gender studies programs in the U.S. in the 1960s. Critical Theory at UCI is an open interdisciplinary space in which, through collective thought, students participate in forming both the curriculum and the realization of what counts as “critical” nowadays; where the right to question is preserved and critique becomes its language, a resource for understanding one’s own precarity and subjugation; and where theory pursues its own unlimited change, even—and especially—in light of the urgency provoked by serial crisis, by our age of social and environmental disintegration.