In February 2025, the California State University system announced a $17 million contract with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT Edu to all faculty, staff, and students on its 22 CSU campuses as part of a larger “AI-Empowered University” initiative. This is the largest contract ever established between a university system and an artificial intelligence company.

Despite the name, ChatGPT Edu is not educational technology. It is a general-purpose chatbot that is not designed, trained, or optimized for education. Beyond its privacy and security features, ChatGPT Edu is identical to the free online version of ChatGPT. ChatGPT Edu does not use reliable peer-reviewed sources to answer students' questions and is indifferent to whether its answers are correct. Experts argue that ChatGPT Edu is harmful to academic working conditions, diminishes the quality of teaching and learning, introduces new forms of discrimination, and is dangerous to students' mental health.

Recent polling shows that CSU students share these concerns, with the majority of students expressing that they are worried about the negative impacts of generative AI on human creativity and the environment.

Chancellor Mildred García approved the contract with OpenAI during a significant budget crisis for the CSU system. In January 2025, Sonoma State University laid off 46 faculty members and closed 6 departments. Many CSU campuses have reduced the number of lecturer faculty positions, including San Francisco State University, which has lost 615 lecturer faculty in the last two years. In December 2025, San Francisco State University offered a voluntary separation package to the majority of retirement age faculty; if fewer than 75 faculty take this package, tenure/tenure-track layoffs are planned. San Francisco State University is one of nine campuses that have received a notice of possible layoffs since 2024. These layoffs threaten the ability of CSU campuses to deliver their curriculum and train California’s future workforce.

The CSU/OpenAI contract is set to expire June 30, 2026.

We, the undersigned, petition Chancellor Mildred García not to renew the CSU’s contract with OpenAI and to use the savings to protect jobs at CSU campuses facing layoffs. We believe that investing in the CSU’s human workforce is the best way to ensure the quality of research, teaching, and learning in California public education. Together with the California Faculty Association, we demand shared governance around AI decision-making and a return to the CSU’s mission, which includes providing California students an education that imparts “breadth of understanding, depth of knowledge, and the acquisition of such skills as will allow them to be responsible citizens in a democracy.”

The CSU must reject Silicon Valley’s AI hype and invest in the people who make this university system a destination for our 460,000 students. The challenges that we face in higher education cannot be resolved with AI. We must, instead, empower faculty, staff, and students to define a sustainable, human-centered future for the CSU system.