This article is part of a series, "Organizing Against the Machines."
In February 2025, faculty and staff across the California State University system received an email from Chancellor Mildred García that broke surprising news: a “first-of-its kind public-private initiative to establish the CSU as the nation’s first and largest AI-powered public university system.” The venture would, the chancellor wrote, make “learning, research, professional development and teaching tools—including ChatGPT—available to all students, faculty and staff across all 23 CSU universities.” Alongside access to AI applications, Cal State would launch an “AI Workforce Acceleration Board,” collaborating with Silicon Valley technology companies and the office of state governor Gavin Newsom to get in on the ground floor of the artificial intelligence boom.
As leaders of a science and technology studies research group on our CSU campus, we were stunned to learn of this undertaking. Though we had been following university conversations on artificial intelligence closely, we had heard nothing about the administration’s plans for an AI venture. In fact, except for two professors and one student who sat on a previously unpublicized CSU committee on generative AI, none of Cal State’s 27,000 faculty members or 460,000 students had heard anything about the institution’s “AI-Empowered CSU” initiative before they opened their email.
Systemwide provision of the large language model (LLM) ChatGPT Edu is the flagship program of the CSU’s AI venture. Cal State faculty and staff received ChatGPT Edu accounts first; access was then rolled out to students in July 2025. Though other universities, such as Oxford and Duke, have also struck deals with AI corporations, Cal State is the largest higher education system to do so. An internally circulated slide deck about the CSU’s AI strategy—obtained through a California Public Records Act request—described the partnership with OpenAI, the corporation that owns ChatGPT, as a “huge branding opp.”
Predictably, the surprise launch of a technology notorious for its disruptive impacts on teaching raised the ire of CSU faculty—ourselves included. Reached for early comment by Mustang News, the student newspaper at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, professors in technology policy, data science, and scientific ethics said they were “blindsided” by the announcement and that it was “mind-boggling” that the administration had not consulted with any CSU experts about the initiative. Across disciplines and campuses, Cal State faculty are furious about the ChatGPT rollout, and over the past year we have resisted it with petitions, public events, media commentaries, and a currently circulating open letter.
In announcing the AI initiative, Chancellor García promised “this comprehensive strategy will elevate our students’ educational experience across all fields of study, empower our faculty’s teaching and research, and help provide the highly educated workforce that will drive California’s future AI-driven economy.” But like many academics across the United States and around the world, we believe generative artificial intelligence creates an end-run around vital practices of independent critical thought. Shortly after the CSU’s AI initiative was announced, we published an opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle expressing our concerns that the uncritical endorsement of artificial intelligence tools may harm students at Cal State. We fear that the OpenAI deal will degrade the value of CSU diplomas, make university writing and grading into meaningless enterprises, introduce new forms of bias and discrimination, and—as one of us (Lincoln) recently wrote for Inside Higher Ed—expose students to serious mental health outcomes that can allegedly arise in association with the use of ChatGPT.
Even though over 85 percent of surveyed Cal State students express concerns about the long-term societal impacts of this technology, the CSU administration maintains that it would be a disservice not to provide them with AI tools. However, ChatGPT Edu is not designed, trained, or customized for education. The only difference between ChatGPT Edu and the free online version is that ChatGPT Edu does not scrape user interactions to train the corporation’s LLMs. While there may be useful educational applications of some artificial intelligence tools, we are skeptical that general-purpose chatbots are valuable in teaching and learning. A recent report by the National Education Policy Center suggests there is currently no evidence besides “commercial marketing claims” for the pedagogical worth of this technology.
These problems notwithstanding, Cal State’s administration argues that CSU graduates must be conversant with AI tools in order to be employable, imagining that future labor markets will demand this from applicants. It is true that the CSU has historically served as an economic engine, graduating students who are well prepared to enter the workforce. But the competitive advantages afforded by AI experience may ultimately prove to be a will-o’-the-wisp—especially given an increasing concern that AI use reduces cognitive abilities and a growing consensus that the AI industry has generated an unsustainable economic bubble.
Brad Erickson, a faculty member in liberal studies and the president of San Francisco State University’s chapter of the California Faculty Association (CFA), an affiliate of the AAUP, underscores this contradiction: “The administration says we should be getting our students ‘industry-ready,’ chasing the jobs. But where people did that for tech jobs before, now they’re out of work. The technology changes so quickly that it has a shelf life—whereas the broad liberal arts education that universities such as ours provide has no shelf life.”
These concerns are critical, and so is the extortionate cost of ChatGPT Edu for the cash-strapped CSU. According to the terms of service agreement that administrators inked with OpenAI, Cal State tendered $16.9 million of what the chancellor described as “one-time funds” for eighteen months of ChatGPT Edu access: almost $1 million a month. This purchasing decision was made during a systemwide budget crisis: On our campus, the administration has offered early retirement to the majority of faculty members over the age of fifty, while proposing to lay off fifty to seventy-five tenured and tenure-track faculty members this fall, increase our teaching load, and carry out university-wide restructuring in the 2026–27 academic year.
For James Martel, a professor of political science and a member of the executive board of SF State’s CFA chapter, Cal State’s costly foray into AI is “a very bad look, for a number of reasons. Most faculty have a very negative attitude toward AI because the students use it to cheat. Investing in the very thing that’s undermining their education is not a good idea.” While Martel describes himself as “implacably hostile” to AI, he’s not opposed to technology per se. “I like technology!” he wryly notes. “I just don't like technologies that are going to destroy our profession and higher education.”
Martel is not alone in this opinion. Amid a growing national AI backlash, a significant share of the media coverage of the “AI-Empowered CSU” initiative has been unfavorable. In June 2025, a New York Times article on the AI venture at Cal State revealed OpenAI’s designs on CSU students as prospective lifelong ChatGPT customers. A subsequent Times article, covering a summer AI bootcamp for CSU students at Cal Poly, quoted students comparing the sessions to “the dystopian show ‘Black Mirror’” and “a timeshare presentation.”
In October 2025, SF State professor Ron Purser published a withering and widely read long-form takedown of the CSU’s AI venture in Current Affairs titled “AI Is Destroying the University and Learning Itself.” Pointing to the systemwide austerity that led to layoffs of faculty members, staff, and administrators and program closures at Sonoma State University in January 2025, Purser wrote, “The math is brutal and the juxtaposition stark: millions for OpenAI while pink slips go out to longtime lecturers. The CSU isn’t investing in education—it’s outsourcing it, paying premium prices for a chatbot many students were already using for free.”
Though university leaders bypassed the union in the rollout of AI at Cal State, CFA organizers were not taken completely by surprise. In fact, in October 2024, four months before the CSU’s AI initiative was announced, union delegates and members had adopted a resolution for a new collective bargaining article governing the use of AI. Resolving “that the California Faculty Association will fight to protect academic labor from the incursion of AI,” the resolution expressed the intent of prohibiting generative AI from replacing the work of bargaining-unit members and preventing the administration from forcing faculty to use AI.
Brian Dolber, associate professor of media and communication studies at CSU–San Marcos, was one of the authors of the original CFA resolution and presented it on the floor at the assembly. “We want to ensure that AI is not going to be used to replace [faculty] work,” he explains. “That’s the most fundamental thing, and other questions about the use of AI should really be seen through a lens of academic freedom. We want the ability to determine how to use these technologies in our classroom.”
Dolber, whose research addresses the gig economy and platform labor, sees the struggle over AI as part of a broader package of contested CSU faculty rights. “Part of this is about protecting our labor, but I think a lot of it is also about protecting our intellectual property and protecting our right to say no. It’s about our right to refuse using these technologies, our right to refuse having our data taken, and our right to refuse working with companies that are operating in other unethical ways.”
More broadly, Dolber says, the AI initiative is “part of the war on working-class education.”
“I see our weddedness to the AI industry as really like we’re sleeping with the enemy,” Dolber comments. “They are completely going after academic freedom and public funding, as well as supporting the larger political infrastructure right now that is aimed at dismantling higher ed. . . . If we don’t fight now, nothing’s getting better.”
Bargaining will represent an important means of asserting faculty rights around AI, with contract negotiations currently underway between the union and CSU management. CFA members drafted contract articles on AI in November 2025 and submitted them to the administration shortly after. But, as Brad Erickson notes, there’s no knowing how long the bargaining process could last. “This spring, we could soldier through and hammer out points where we agree with management and where we don’t; any side could declare impasse and walk away,” he explains. “It’s unpredictable.”
The union is using legal means as well as bargaining to resist the AI initiative. CFA has filed two separate unfair practice charges against Cal State on AI-related matters, as Kathy Sheffield, CFA’s director of representation and bargaining, confirmed. Unfair practice charges are filed in response to perceived violations of the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act. The first unfair practice charge related to AI addresses the CSU’s attempt “to impose the use of bots for faculty and union work” at Sacramento State. The second, filed in April 2025, addresses the CSU’s broader AI initiative—on the grounds that it may “impact faculty workload, work assignments, and could lead to potential job loss,” as Sheffield explains.
Thus far, the CSU administration has stonewalled the union’s concerns about how faculty will be affected by AI. “When we demanded to meet and confer, the CSU refused,” Sheffield states. “The CSU insisted that it need not meet with the union even when we supplied additional concerns about data privacy and the use of faculty intellectual property.”
The union’s filing has been upheld, suggesting the merit of these concerns. In January 2026, the California Public Employment Relations Board issued a complaint against the CSU over the AI initiative. According to Jason Conwell, a senior representation specialist at CFA, the decision indeed “indicates that the CSU has an obligation to meet and confer with the union over AI.” However, no settlement was reached between CFA and the CSU at a mandatory settlement conference on March 11—meaning the matter will proceed next to a formal hearing conducted by an administrative law judge.
As James Martel notes, CFA has limited capacity to fight against the AI initiative, given the onslaught of other issues confronting the union. “In a normal time, we’d have been much more aggressive in pushing back on AI—but we have so much more to worry about. Unfortunately, AI goes down lower on the list than it should—even though I think it’s ultimately the most existential challenge to academia of all.”
We agree that CSU faculty are currently embattled on too many fronts, such that the “AI-Empowered CSU” initiative comes as something of a backbreaking last straw. At the same time, the struggle around artificial intelligence crystallizes many of the most serious challenges that professors are facing at Cal State. These concerns range from intellectual property, academic freedom, and equitable education to budgets, salaries, and simply remaining employed. Indeed, as we prepared this article, we were unsure whether we ourselves would be teaching in the CSU much longer, given the prospect of layoffs and program closures on our campus this year.
Equally sadly, the AI initiative appears to have been developed without an awareness of what makes the CSU distinct. Cal State is a genuinely remarkable institution—historically symbolizing high-quality, affordable liberal arts education for working-class Californians. It is a poor fit for a costly, ethically fraught technology associated with intellectual property violations, “hallucinated” outputs, deepfakes, mental health harms, “slop,” and even the Trump administration’s war on Iran.
ChatGPT is making our jobs harder—not only in the classroom and in our departments, but in current and future struggles over faculty rights. The CSU’s contract with OpenAI will expire this June. We’d be encouraged to see the CSU administration cancel the deal and invest instead in its human workforce. In the meantime, we will be fighting the “AI-Empowered CSU” initiative on every front.
Martha Lincoln is associate professor of medical and cultural anthropology at San Francisco State University. Her research addresses the cultural politics of public health, with recent projects addressing medical crowdfunding and online health influencing. Her email address is [email protected]. Martha Kenney, professor of women and gender studies at San Francisco State University, is a science and technology studies scholar who works at the intersection of feminist theory, speculative fiction, and contemporary technoscience. Her email address is [email protected].