The avatar is one feature of S.J.S.U.’s A.I. Everywhere strategy, which was formally announced in the fall of 2025 and aims to integrate the technology across campus life. Teniente-Matson devised A.I. Everywhere as part of the California State University system’s broader A.I. Initiative, introduced in February 2025. Anchored by a $16.9 million deal with OpenAI, the initiative provides a total of 500,000 licenses of ChatGPT.edu to be issued to all students, faculty and administrators. At the time, this was the largest single-institution deployment of ChatGPT in the world, billed as an attempt to turn C.S.U. — the biggest four-year public higher education system in the United States, comprising 22 distinct campuses and educating 1 out of every 10 workers in the state — into “the nation’s first and largest A.I.-powered public university system.” (The terms of the deal stipulate that OpenAI may not train its model on data from the C.S.U.)

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Because the world’s largest tech firms are headquartered in California, the state has generally become a petri dish for A.I. experiments in education. In early August, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed education agreements with Nvidia, Adobe, Google, IBM and Microsoft; each company agreed to provide free A.I. resources to California schools. The goal is to create the “A.I. work force of the future” by training high school, community college and C.S.U. students to use the technology.

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A.I. tools were rolled out across the C.S.U. system late last spring, right as students and faculty were preparing for finals. “We didn’t know it was coming,” says Andrew Taylor Scott, a machine-learning researcher and lecturer at San Francisco State University. The university didn’t explicitly mandate that teachers use A.I. in the classroom, but the message was clear: Refusing to integrate A.I. into their courses was to swim against the current.

To make matters worse, the A.I. Initiative coincided with a $2.3 billion deficit that resulted in mass layoffs of tenured faculty, the shuttering of entire academic departments and a 6 percent tuition increase. In that context, many professors felt pressure to adopt for fear of losing their jobs. Classroom by classroom, they were left to figure out how to adapt. Some embraced the chancellor’s guidance; some refused on principle to incorporate A.I. into their teaching at all.

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Faculty members I spoke with opted for different metaphors to describe the effect of A.I. on higher education, and their varied analogies captured the range of sentiments on campus. John Sullins, a computer ethics professor, likened it to handing every student a machine gun, while Niel Shahrasbi, an information systems professor, compared it to giving them a magic wand. Robert Ovetz, a lecturer in political science at S.J.S.U., told me he views A.I. as “an ‘intelligent’ steam shovel” that students are being trained to use. Jeremy Murray, a historian at Cal State San Bernardino, described the integration of A.I. as a “smash and grab situation” akin to a bank robbery.

Some of the most vocal, full-throated opposition to the A.I. Initiative has come from one particular C.S.U. campus: San Francisco State University. S.F.S.U., a cluster of California modernist buildings, sits just above Lake Merced in San Francisco’s southwestern corner. The university is among the most liberal C.S.U.s, with a venerable tradition of protest and radicalism — in 1968, it was where the Third World Liberation Front movement first emerged.

The week I visited, a handful of students lazed on the grass, played volleyball and wandered around the student center, but the campus still felt relatively empty. “This is more or less what it’s like these days,” said Martha Lincoln, a professor of anthropology, as we passed the main library. Demographic decline and the rise of remote learning has meant that there are fewer students physically on campus than ever before. It is impossible to traverse S.F.S.U.’s lush walkways and pass through its mazelike halls without realizing that it was built to serve thousands of students more than it currently hosts.

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CSU’s A.I. Initiative has set off an institutional identity crisis: The debate about A.I. on campus is also a debate about exactly what public education in California is for. What does it mean to train the next generation of Californian workers and citizens when neither students nor faculty nor administrators have a solid grasp on what that requires, or what the “A.I. economy” will be in even four years? “No one knows what it’s going to look like,” Brian Johnsrud, a leader on Adobe’s education team, told me in a small library at the company’s headquarters. “And if they say they do, they are highly overconfident.” Even Teniente-Matson admitted that despite all the fanfare, the university’s A.I. Everywhere approach should not be taken literally. “I don’t know that ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity, or any of these are tools that should be teaching a 17-year-old to write,” she said. A.I. might be used to help students learn how to outline and edit their thoughts, she suggested, but only with faculty guidance and supervision.

The one thing proponents and detractors of the A.I. Initiative agree on is that it has prompted a near-universal reckoning over labor relations on campus. The omnipresence of ChatGPT has forced a conversation about the value of academic work, the role of public universities and the perils of partnerships with private industry. Even among the most fervent members of C.S.U.’s pro-A.I. crowd, OpenAI’s entanglement with the university has raised eyebrows.

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In mid-May, all C.S.U. faculty received a message announcing that the university system would continue its partnership with OpenAI. The new, $13 million agreement will provide more licenses for the next three years, and is subject to annual renewal. As part of the deal, new graduates will be able to retain access to ChatGPT.edu for one year after earning their degrees, to help with their entry into the work force. The chancellor’s office also said it would expand its A.I. offerings so that students had more ready access to platforms other than ChatGPT and maintain some degree of freedom in how they interacted with the technology. For many students and faculty members, the ability to choose which A.I. platform they engage with, and on what terms, is a meaningful step. Yet what it means to use these tools ethically and responsibly in the classroom — and what their long-term effects on student learning will be — remains an open question.

Not long before the OpenAI deal was first announced, John Sullins, a tenured professor of philosophy at Sonoma State, was told that his department was closing down and that much of the humanities faculty had been let go. After more than 25 years of teaching, he suddenly found himself out of a job. He spent a few weeks coming to terms with his newfound unemployment.

But then he got a call informing him that he had been rehired into the computer science department, where he now teaches courses on A.I. ethics and the philosophy of technology. “With the decimation will always come the return,” Sullins says. C.S.U. prides itself on its history of rebuilding in the aftermath of disaster — Tower Hall, at S.J.S.U., was built from the rubble after earthquakes and fires destroyed the school’s original structures. “The question is,” Sullins says, “how far does the decimation go?”