Colleges and universities nationwide have faced waves of student protests pushing back on institutional policies that embrace the use of artificial intelligence tools on campus.
That includes students and faculty at Columbia University who in May railed against the use of AI to announce graduates' names during commencement ceremonies, and students and employees at Emory University who in April called on administrators to remove AI-powered surveillance cameras from campus.
Universities have used AI tools to assist with a host of administrative functions, such as scheduling courses and nudging students to register for classes. In addition, many college officials are pushing to embed instruction on AI into curricula as businesses increasingly use generative AI platforms like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
The embrace of AI has caused tension among students and faculty wary about its environmental, ethical, pedagogical, social and academic integrity impacts, said Victor Lee, faculty lead at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning's initiative to support educators in navigating the AI era.
Holding intentional conversations with students and faculty about AI use on campus can help ease concerns, said Lee.
Faculty members aren’t necessarily opposed to the technology, experts say, but training on the tools is spotty and they would like to be part of conversations about how their institutions use AI.
Robert Ovetz, a San José State University professor, is among the faculty members who have vocally opposed universities integrating AI into curricula with little to no input from faculty or their unions.
“This is the transformation of the very mission of public education, and it can’t just be implemented one way from the top,” said Ovetz, who is co-author of the forthcoming book “Organizing Against AI in Higher Education.”
Institutional support for AI
SJSU formally launched an initiative called AI Everywhere in fall 2025 with the aim of ethically and responsibly integrating the technology throughout campus. The initiative is part of an effort to prepare students for the future workforce, said Sandra Hirsh, the university's special assistant to the provost for AI initiatives.
It’s also part of a larger push by the California State University system, which signed contracts with several AI-focused tech companies in 2025, including a nearly $17 million deal with Open AI to provide ChatGPT Edu to more than 460,000 students and 63,000 faculty and staff throughout its 22 campuses. CSU renewed its contract with OpenAI this year to the tune of $13 million annually for three years.
By the start of the 2027-28 academic year, SJSU expects to have 28 AI-related programs and 101 courses, Hirsh said. That would represent a 75% and 36% increase, respectively, since fall 2025.
The university also launched a host of new AI events and initiatives, including faculty training on one of tech company Nvidia’s platforms. In the same vein, it worked with the city of San Jose to open the AI Center for Civic and Social Good, a space at a joint public and university academic library where community residents, students and workers can use AI education tools, Hirsh said.
"This is the transformation of the very mission of public education, and it can’t just be implemented one way from the top."
Robert Ovetz
Professor at San José State University
While the scale of SJSU's AI efforts are significant, it's hardly the only institution to embrace the technology. Almost every institution is using or plans to use AI in some capacity, said Hironao Okahana, formerly managing researcher and chief of planning and impact at the American Council on Education.
In many places, that has translated into new courses. Over one-third of surveyed faculty members, 37%, said their institution had created new AI-focused classes, according to a report released in January by the American Association of Colleges and Universities and Elon University, which polled over 1,000 instructors in fall 2025.
And as of last July, a quarter of senior higher ed leaders reported adopting generative AI technologies at their institutions for student support, with another 22% planning to do so within the next six months, according to an ACE fall 2025 survey. Another 43% said they planned to adopt AI technologies within the next one to two years.
Broad concerns with AI
Many students, meanwhile, have issues with the ways large language models use data without their knowledge and consent, and how these systems reproduce and amplify existing forms of discrimination in society, among a host of other concerns, said Lindsay Weinberg, a professor and director of Purdue University’s Tech Justice Lab.
And some students are apprehensive about their universities forging partnerships with companies that use AI for military purposes, Weinberg said.
In April, SJSU students protested their university’s ties to companies including Nvidia, OpenAI, and Google for that reason, Spartan Media Group reported.
Many faculty share the students' concerns. And both faculty and students express misgivings about the environmental consequences from AI and how data centers cause noise pollution and negatively impact local water and electrical systems, said Weinberg.
Students are also hearing widespread reports about how AI will automate entry-level jobs, shrinking their job opportunities, Ovetz added.
Unease regarding education quality
Faculty have broad worries on AI’s impact on higher education, said C. Edward Watson, vice president for digital innovation at AAC&U and co-author of the association’s faculty survey report.
Nearly 52% of staff and faculty at CSU institutions indicated they were skeptical of the benefits of AI in higher education, with about 85% indicating they were concerned about the ethical use of the technology, according to 2025 system survey data.
A nationwide survey from AAC&U also highlighted additional sweeping concerns from faculty. About three-quarters of faculty said cheating spiked on their campuses when generative AI tools became widespread and that they believed the technology would impact degree integrity.
Meanwhile, nearly all faculty members, 95%, expressed concern about students becoming overreliant on AI tools, and large majorities indicated the technology would diminish students’ critical thinking skills and attention spans, according to the report.
Overall, Ovetz said, many educators say that by using AI, students are cheating themselves out of the reasons they are attending college — to learn and expand their understanding, consciousness and awareness.
For some students, their opposition to AI is part of broader resistance to technology and social media shifting from being optional to seemingly mandatory in today’s society — including on campuses, said Lucy Jackson, a sophomore at Binghamton University, in New York.
Jackson was an early member of the Luddite Club, a New York City-based anti-tech youth group that has turned into a global movement with roughly 40 campus and regional chapters over the past five years.
When students enroll at a university, they are expecting to receive an education, not a requirement that they have to interact with certain technologies, said Jackson.
But some students are using AI tools to help with their homework or exams, giving them an unfair advantage, and getting a “way out of education” — allowing them to earn a degree “without having to do much,” Jackson said.
“That creates a culture that isn’t necessarily something that everybody wants to live in or that everyone wants to follow,” said Jackson. “That’s where a lot of the pushback comes from.”
Support for AI literacy
Despite the concerns, faculty aren’t broadly rejecting AI tools, Ovetz said. Many view generative AI as an interesting tool to incorporate into their teaching, for example by using chatbots to help students engage with course material, said Ovetz.
At CSU, 61% of faculty and staff said they regularly use AI-powered tools or applications when teaching, researching or performing their work, and 64% say it positively affects those tasks, according to the survey of CSU campuses.
Higher ed leaders have been grappling with how to integrate AI literacy into the curriculum, who should be teaching courses on how to use AI, what type of professional development should be required for instructors and what type of tools they should provide to faculty and students, Watson said.
While colleges and universities are good at adding new courses to meet student needs,they are not good at doing it fast, said Watson. It usually takes a few semesters of discussions with faculty and employers to determine what students need to know, he said.
That was reflected in the AAC&U survey, with 68% of faculty reporting their institutions had not prepared educators to use generative AI “for effective teaching and mentoring.” Less than half reported their institutions had written guidelines for AI use, and just 13% had adopted AI literacy as “a general learning outcome.”
That’s despite a widespread belief among faculty members that it’s important to teach students about issues related to AI during class, the AAC&U survey found. Large majorities stated it was important to teach students about inaccurate statements produced by GenAI tools, how the tools are used to produce misinformation and deep fakes, and how they erode copyright and authorship, according to the survey.
It has been largely left to individual professors to design or restructure their courses with AI, said Lee. The vast majority of faculty, 87%, said they have created their own policies on students’ use of generative AI for assessments, projects and tests, the survey found.
That’s not surprising, however, as decisions about what faculty teach are not usually made top-down, Lee said.
“The law and philosophy of academic freedom and trusting the learning expertise of the faculty leaves a little bit more of a hands-off orientation,” Lee said.
A collaborative process?
When administrators form partnerships with tech companies and push technologies without discussing those initiatives with unions or faculty members on their campuses, they often draw the ire of the students and employees most impacted by those decisions, said Weinberg.
Last year, the California Faculty Association filed an unfair labor practice charge against CSU, alleging the university system failed to notify the union when it launched an AI initiative in 2025 and refused to meet to discuss faculty rights and the impacts that it would have. CFA represents some 29,000 professors, lecturers and other workers at CSU.
The union complaint underscored the need for administrators to slow down on AI adoption so those initiatives can go through the shared governance process and be bargained over with academic unions, said Ovetz, who has been involved in the bargaining efforts.
CFA in February introduced an article in their negotiations with the university to protect faculty from being required to use the tools and provide them with intellectual property protections. Those negotiations have been ongoing for a year and a half, said Ovetz, but no agreement or contract has yet been reached.
“We are planning to vote to strike in the coming months, including over AI,” Ovetz said.
Those protections are important, as workloads increase for faculty who have to learn how to use AI tools as well as constantly check students' work to see if it was written using the technology, said Ovetz.
Many institutions that have succeeded in integrating AI for teaching or administrative purposes have established universitywide committees that discuss new pieces of technology and goals for using them, said Okahana. Those committees should include various campus stakeholder and constituent groups to help get people on board with new technologies, he said.
SJSU, for example, formed a 15-member AI advisory committee in 2024 composed of various university stakeholders, including faculty, students and staff, to advise administrators on how to ethically integrate AI tools throughout campus.
More than half of faculty reported their institutions had implemented a task force or group to oversee and manage implementation of AI tools across their campus, according to the AAC&U survey.
“Stakeholder engagement is really important and not just a tool to plug in,” said Okahana. “It is challenging us to think about how we do the teaching, how we run the university.”
Ovetz, however, said an advisory committee “is just that: advisory.”
CFA filed an unfair labor practice charge with the state, he said, “exactly because this violated our collective bargaining agreement and was implemented without bargaining with the faculty union.”
