Faculty Push Back Against OpenAI Deals

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | stuartbur/iStock/Getty Images

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More than a year after the California State University system spent $17 million to give all students, faculty and staff access to ChatGPT Edu in the name of workforce readiness, thousands don’t want the system to renew its contract with OpenAI.

While they’re skeptical of the product’s ability to enhance teaching and learning and worried about its potential to worsen working conditions and student mental health, the CSU system’s ongoing financial troubles are driving the pushback. In January, faculty wrote a petition asking Chancellor Mildred García not to renew the CSU’s contract with OpenAI, which expires June 30, and instead “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,” the petition reads. “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.”

The CSU system’s contract with OpenAI is the largest of such partnerships to date, but the company has also inked deals with numerous other universities, including Arizona State University, the University of Oxford and the University of South Carolina. One of the latest—a $2 million annual contract with the University of Colorado system announced last month—has already generated faculty pushback.

Investing in ‘Hype’?

At both the CU and CSU systems, such deals are raising questions about institutional priorities.

When it announced the deal with OpenAI in February 2025, the CSU system—which has 460,000 students and 63,000 faculty and staff across 23 campuses—was facing a potential $375 million state budget cut and many of its universities were already in the process of tightening their belts though layoffs, program closures and reductions in course offerings. (The CSU system was spared from the bulk of those cuts in the state’s final budget.)

“In February 2025, we all got an email out of the blue announcing the AI-Empowered CSU initiative that we hadn’t heard anything about. We were really surprised,” said Martha Kenney, a professor of women’s and gender studies at San Francisco State University, which has eliminated 615 lecturer positions over the past two years and offered buyouts to all tenured and tenure-track faculty. “In the middle of the budget crisis, it’s best to invest in the humans that make the CSU system great, rather than buy in to Silicon Valley’s hype.”

But that hype is powerful.

Like every other higher education institution, the CSU system is also under mounting pressure to address the tech sector’s predictions that artificial intelligence–powered technology will soon wipe out many entry-level white-collar jobs—and that AI-literate job seekers will have a leg up.

At the same time, big tech companies are jockeying to corner the massive higher education market and make loyal customers out of the next generation of workers. Over the past two years, many have rolled out education-specific versions of their large language models, including Anthropic’s Claude for Education, Google’s Gemini for Education and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Edu, which allow students, faculty, researchers and administrators to use the technology in a closed, secure system.

All three companies have since formed AI partnerships with colleges and universities, but OpenAI is winning the race so far. In December, Bloomberg reported that the company had sold more than 700,000 ChatGPT licenses to about 35 public universities.

But from what some faculty at CSU have seen over the past year, they aren’t convinced that ChatGPT Edu is a revolutionary new classroom tool.

That’s in part because “despite the name, ChatGPT Edu is not educational technology. It is a general-purpose chatbot that is not designed, trained, or optimized for education,” the petition asserts. “Beyond its privacy and security features, ChatGPT Edu is identical to the free online version of ChatGPT.”

In practice, having access to ChatGPT Edu hasn’t changed much, said Martha Lincoln, an associate professor of anthropology at San Francisco State who is also leading the faculty dissent against the OpenAI contract.

“My fall semester teaching was much the same as other semesters. We are not required in any way by our administration to use these tools. Some student work shows evidence of LLM use, but that was the case before we entered into this contract,” she said. “The introduction of a university-sponsored [LLM] doesn’t really change the conversation in the classroom, except insofar as students are tacitly being given permission by the institution to see it as a legitimate part of their learning.”

And because there’s not much guidance on how ChatGPT Edu should—or could—be used in the classroom, students are getting “mixed messages,” said Kenney, Lincoln’s colleague and fellow OpenAI dissenter.

“Some classes ban it outright. Some faculty have policies that require students who use it to cite it or describe their process. And other faculty are allowing students to use it for whatever purpose they see fit,” she said, adding that she’s banned the use of generative AI. “It would behoove us to have institutional guidelines so that students could have critical AI literacy and consistent policies that help them understand how this fits or doesn’t fit with their education.”

However, even education experts are still not clear on all of the potential benefits and downsides of AI-powered technology, which has evolved at a rapid pace in the nearly three and a half years since OpenAI debuted the original ChatGPT. To aid in that research, the CSU system last July allocated $3 million for 63 faculty-led projects aimed at researching the intersections of AI and higher education.

“AI can’t really do everything for everyone all at once, but it’s very good at doing specific things for specific populations,” said Tal Slemrod, an education professor at Chico State. “One of the challenges we have with the big CSU/OpenAI contract is that it’s all put together in this big jumble of AI doing everything.”

Although Slemrod said he hasn’t signed the petition, he wants the CSU system to provide some data about the benefits of ChatGPT Edu, specifically, before it renews the contract this summer.

In an email to Inside Higher Ed, a CSU system spokesperson said that it has indeed surveyed more than 94,000 students, faculty and staff about how they are using AI for teaching and learning. Though results of the survey are not yet publicly available, the system says they plan to release them soon.

“Learnings from this survey will help the CSU Generative AI Committee make informed recommendations on how AI can better support our community,” Amy Bentley-Smith, director of media relations and public affairs, said. When asked if the CSU system plans to renew its contract with OpenAI, she added that it’s “considering all options that will allow the CSU to continue to provide students, faculty, and staff access to AI tools, resources, and training.”

‘Overshadowed’ in Colorado

In the meantime, a similar battle over ChatGPT Edu has only just begun at the University of Colorado system.

To the surprise of some faculty and staff, the CU system announced in February that it had signed a $2 million–a–year contract with OpenAI—renewable annually for three years—to provide ChatGPT Edu to more than 100,000 students, staff and faculty across the system.

“We know that for some members of our community, generative AI raises significant concerns around privacy, sustainability and ethical use,” Todd Saliman, CU president, wrote in a Feb. 11 systemwide email announcing the deal. “We share those concerns and are working to mitigate—where possible—the impacts. We continue to believe, however, that the importance of this tool today and in the future for our students, faculty and staff offers a return on investment we cannot ignore.”

In response, faculty and students wrote an open letter of dissent, recommending, among other things, that faculty lead development of an “ethical use policy, critical AI literacy training materials, and guidelines about how the university should communicate about the OpenAI contract and product.”

The letter, which has since been signed by hundreds of faculty and students, raises concerns about OpenAI’s commitment to data privacy, the limited evidence showing ChatGPT Edu’s benefits to teaching and learning, and the CU system’s motivations for signing the contract in the first place.

Saliman’s comment that the deal “offers a return on investment we cannot ignore” highlights “the financial incentives driving this agreement, which we believe have overshadowed the educational needs of students, staff, and faculty,” the letter said. “The CU System has not meaningfully consulted its own experts, nor has it taken enough prophylactic action to ensure a safe and effective rollout of this new product. While many of us would prefer a divestment from OpenAI, we recognize that this outcome is unlikely.”

And similar to the CSU system, some CU campuses are also facing major budget cuts amid announcement of the deal with OpenAI. Earlier this year, the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs announced a five-year plan to close its current $27.7 million budget gap, including cutting $11.7 million in spending this year.

While the CU system is covering the first year of the $2 million–a–year contract, a university web page about the deal says its four campuses “will assume the cost of their individual environments” after that.

“People are upset that there appears to be money to support AI but not faculty and staff,” said Dylan Harris, an assistant professor of geography at Colorado Springs and president of the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “It is not that AI is taking our jobs per se, but that AI is being prioritized over many of our jobs.”

While the university plans to make the tool available for all faculty and staff by March 31, it’s delaying student access until Aug. 14, according to a recent memo from Saliman. “We have heard concerns from faculty about disruption to the learning environment and take Faculty Council concerns seriously,” he wrote. “We fully endorse the right of faculty to establish and maintain their individual classroom expectations.”

‘Upset’ About AI or the University’s Priorities?

But not every university with an OpenAI contract is dealing with such intense faculty rebukes.

“It’s part of us creating college degrees that are relevant,” Elisa Kawam, a social work professor and president of the Arizona State Faculty Senate, told Inside Higher Ed. “We are all under the realization that we have to learn how to use this, teach this and model this because that’s the way the world is going. Ethically, we cannot teach without preparing our students for that.”

Giving all students and faculty access to ChatGPT Edu has only made adaptation easier, she added. “Before we had access, many students and faculty were paying for their own licenses or using free versions. People were using it, just not in a uniform way,” she said. “This allows me to integrate ChatGPT Edu into my classes in a much more transparent, measured, accountable way because I know everyone has access.”

ASU was the first university to partner with OpenAI, in 2024, and it’s already on its third contract. According to contracts obtained by a public records request, the university’s first one-year contract, which expired in December 2024, was valued at $300,000. The second, which expired in September 2025, was valued at $216,260. And the third, which expires in September, was valued at $2.1 million.

From Kawam’s perspective, it’s worth it. But that’s in part because, unlike the CSU and CU systems, ASU faculty aren’t worried about losing their jobs, too. “We have a new technology, but we haven’t seen any cuts to faculty engagement, salaries or hiring,” she said. “We’ve been able to hold constant with what we know as professors, while also getting to play with this new technology.”

At the universities where there is faculty pushback, she added, “the question is are they upset about the technology or are they upset about the university’s priorities as a whole?”

No matter a university’s financial picture, it’s crucial to keep faculty at the center of these decisions to provide campuswide access to ChatGPT Edu or the phalanx of other AI-powered learning tools emerging by the day, said C. Edward Watson, vice president for digital innovation at the American Association of Colleges and Universities.

“We’re at a moment where AI is likely an essential tool for campuses to have access to, but the larger question is how to meet that need,” he said. “There’s lots of companies providing solutions these days, and there may be cheaper paths to be explored. Including faculty in that procurement process increases trust within the institution and would also help ensure to make the best decision. Those who are using and teaching from the tools need to be a part of the conversation.”