Who Gets the Bill
The California State University system wants to become the nation's first artificial intelligence-powered institution of its kind, and it is doing so with a no-bid contract that now runs to $17 million last year and another $13 million a year for the next three years. The deal with OpenAI gives students, faculty and staff access to ChatGPT Edu, while majorities of students and faculty say they are skeptical of AI's benefits for education and worry about its effects on job security, creativity and the environment.
Mildred García, the CSU's chancellor, announced the partnership in February 2025 and boasted, "No other university system in the U.S. or internationally is doing anything like this, not at this scale." The scale is the point: a public university system serving about 470,000 students is locking itself into a corporate AI vendor while the people inside it are left to absorb the consequences.
What the System Calls Innovation
Ed Clark, chief information officer for the CSU's office of the chancellor, defended the deal in an email, saying "the planning document demonstrates the extent to which the CSU thoughtfully approached selecting a vendor that could support our commitment to innovation, accessibility and academic excellence." He said OpenAI was chosen because it offered "the most cost-effective option that could make it even possible to bring AI tools to more than a half a million students, faculty and staff."
An internal CSU planning document obtained by NPR in December 2024 described the potential partnership with OpenAI as "a huge branding opp[ortunity]." Another document dated 2025, titled "Potential follow-up questions on ChatGPT Initiative," advised officials to explain the no-bid contract by saying the deal is "essential for the success of the CSU's AI strategy." That same document said, "After conducting extensive research and evaluating various AI tools and vendors, it was determined that OpenAI is uniquely positioned to meet our needs."
The language is polished, but the structure is plain enough: a public institution is using its authority to funnel millions to a private company, then dressing the arrangement up as inevitability, strategy and branding.
Who Pays, Who Questions
The CSU says AI will not be used to teach classes and should supplement learning, not replace it. Clark said, "As they prepare for the workforce, AI literacy is becoming part of career readiness… so the CSU's role is to help students understand how AI is changing their disciplines and how to use it ethically and responsibly." Leah Belsky, vice president of education at OpenAI, said the company shares a responsibility to "help students use these tools well… to harness their full potential and succeed in the AI-driven future of work."
But the people inside the system are not lining up in obedient harmony. Martha Kenney, a professor and science and technology scholar at San Francisco State University, said some faculty and students reject the idea that AI in higher education is inevitable and that their perspective deserves consideration. She said, "I think refusing this technology needs to be a position that's on the table." Kenney said rejecting the technology on campuses is justified because of generative AI's environmental impact and the use of copyrighted work to train models. She also said offering a chatbot that allows students to take shortcuts on assignments is "cheating our students out of an education." Kenney co-authored a petition that called on the CSU not to renew its contract for ChatGPT Edu.
Clark replied that the "online petition does not reflect overall sentiment from within our community." He said the CSU's survey shows strong support for AI because majorities of students and faculty say it has had a positive impact on their learning and work. He also said the CSU renewed its agreement with OpenAI after its generative AI advisory committee, composed of students, faculty and staff, "unanimously recommended renewing the contract."
The Campus Reality
The CSU invited students, staff and faculty across all 22 campuses to take a survey on their views around AI last fall, and more than 94,000 people responded. The results showed widespread use of generative AI tools but also significant ambivalence. More than half of students and around 6-in-10 faculty and staff reported using AI regularly for coursework and tasks related to their jobs. Roughly 65% of students and 59% of faculty said they were skeptical AI was benefitting education overall. About 80% of students said they would not be comfortable turning in AI-generated work as their own.
The survey also found that about 64% of students said AI had positively affected their learning, while about 35% said AI negatively affected their learning. About 56% of faculty reported AI had positively affected their teaching, research and administrative experience, but in a separate survey question, 52% reported a negative effect. Roughly 84% of students said they used ChatGPT. About a quarter of them said they used the version provided by CSU and the vast majority said they used the free version.
Large majorities of students and faculty also worried about AI's impact on creativity, job security and the environment: 83% of students and 82% of faculty worried about creativity, 82% of students and 78% of faculty worried about job security, and 80% of students and 84% of faculty worried about the environment.
David Goldberg, an associate professor at San Diego State University and one of the survey authors, said, "The findings are based on the people who did respond. We don't know the opinions of the people who didn't." He said the responses were a "pretty good representation across different fields of study and across different demographics." Goldberg said the survey showed a tremendous amount of nuance in opinion across all groups. "Even within one student, you can be using the tool a lot, see real advantages, and at the same time see these negatives," he said.
Sejal Daterao, 30, said she enrolled in the information systems master's program at California State University, Long Beach, to learn how to use AI more efficiently. She said she uses ChatGPT Edu and other AI tools to conduct research, summarize text and video lectures, and create quizzes targeted to the subjects she's studying. She said she is grateful the CSU provides access to ChatGPT Edu, which includes features not available on the free version of ChatGPT, because as a grad student it would be hard for her to pay for a premium subscription. "Helping students use such technologies firsthand is really a good thing, honestly," Daterao said. But she said she is not pro-AI. She said she is frustrated by false information AI chatbots generate and by tech companies' use of creative work to train AI models without providing credit and compensation to artists. "It has a lot of bad sides, and a lot of good sides," Daterao said. "If you are smart, if you are being ethical, you can use the good sides in a really amazing way."
Another student, H, a fourth-year computer science student at San José State University, also part of the CSU, asked NPR to refer to her by only her first initial because she is actively applying to tech jobs and does not want her opinions on AI to affect her employment prospects. H said she was annoyed when she noticed classmates using AI to write assignments. "It was pissing me off, which is why I completely avoided using it at first," she said. Eventually, she began using AI chatbots for "menial tasks" like writing emails and then to help on coding assignments. But she said, "I found that I was using it more as a crutch instead of actually helping. So that was one of the telltale signs that I should stop using it." She said her resistance to AI has deepened as she has learned about the environmental impacts of data centers. H said she is "a little disappointed that they accepted it with open arms immediately." She also worried that pushing AI use in coursework would prevent students from learning foundational skills. "It's something I've struggled with," she said. "Trying to use it to learn basics kind of led to just not learning basics, but using it to avoid putting in effort."
Zach Justus, a communications professor and director of faculty development at California State University, Chico, part of the CSU, said he has spent the last few years encouraging faculty to adapt their teaching to the AI age by experimenting with the technology to figure out what it can and can't do. He said he is excited about innovative ways some faculty members are leveraging and allowing students to use AI, but that adaptation in some circumstances also includes redesigning coursework to prevent AI use. "The most important thing that we tell faculty is that they cannot ignore the technology," Justus said. "If we ignore it, we are not doing our jobs." He said he understands critiques of the university system's contract with OpenAI, including the argument that the system should not spend millions on an AI chatbot when it is facing budget cuts. But he said it is also a problem if only some students can afford the premium versions of the software. Without the system providing these tools to students, Justus said, "You're just systematically advantaging students with more financial resources, and that's crappy."
Jennifer Trainor, an English professor at San Francisco State University, said her approach is to teach students about AI and the ethical questions it raises. She said she safeguards the learning process from AI by requiring students to brainstorm and draft by hand during class time. She allows students to use AI to edit their writing, but requires them to reflect critically on the changes it made. "I am really trying to get them to do their own writing and thinking," Trainor said. "And I'm also giving them chances to see what happens when they use tools to improve their writing and thinking." Trainor said some students refuse to engage with AI altogether and described it as a "groundswelling of resistance" on campus. "They're ethically opposed to the environmental impacts and the bias and the erasure of their jobs and voices and creativity. [They] don't like it," Trainor said. She said it is clear that, for now, AI is not going anywhere.