Education for Sale? ChatGPT, CSU and the Future of the University

An Educator’s Purpose in 2026 

Jan 13

In 2026, I am thinking, writing, crafting, and consulting with a purpose in mind: that of the educator. To me, the educator spans the wide range of work that I do, both formally and informally, in and outside of postsecondary institutions, workplaces, conferences, professional development sessions, and on/through social media. 

I was reminded of the saying, “As Goes California So Goes the Nation” while reading Ronald Purser’s scathing essay, "AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself.” And, yet, I am hoping, perhaps naively, that other jurisdictions in the US and around the world, might chart a different course from what Purser describe is happening in California.

Purser examines the decidedly ironic situation of California’s State University system formally signing a multi-million-dollar partnership with OpenAI, the creators of the ubiquitous ChatGPT. at the same time that its administrators shutter a range of academic programs and implement faculty layoffs. Purser painstakingly offers first-hand accounts of workshops by ChatGPT denizens flocking to CSU to offer tutorials for faculty on how to use and implement AI in their teaching and assessment and ‘prompt’ students on how to use genAI in the classroom.

As Purser describes:

At San Francisco State University, the provost’s office formally notified our union, the California Faculty Association (CFA) of potential layoffs—an announcement that sent shockwaves through campus as faculty tried to reconcile budget cuts with the administration’s AI enthusiasm. The irony was hard to miss: the same month our union received layoff threats, OpenAI’s education evangelists set up shop in the university library to recruit faculty into the gospel of automated learning.

While we might be hard-pressed to find a higher education institution that is not offering workshops on genAI usage in classroom pedagogy and assessment, Purser’s descriptions are surreal and vivid, and repeatedly asks us what could be happening to higher education as we previously have imagined and constructed it. Throughout the essay, with subtitles such as “for sale: critical education” (which reminds me of the provocative “Love for Sale” art of American artist Barbara Kruger), Purser repeatedly asks about the purpose of higher education, and for me, also the purpose of the ‘higher’ educator. Purser notes that the budget casts are particularly affecting programs in the humanities and social sciences. Yet another irony, of which Purser is only too aware: these subjects are precisely the ones where the desirable “human” skills and the skills which we might expect to be taught at university, from critical thinking, creativity, imagination, discernment, and others, are being outsourced to genAI.

Yet, the sale of public education, importantly, is older than the arrival of Sam Altman, ChatGPT and AI. Purser contextualizes his arguments within the larger trajectory of the transformation of the public university within the context of neoliberal capitalism and the rise and expansion of credentialism. In addition to the increasing centrality of seeing higher education as a legitimated site to earn credentials, Purser writes that:

Academic departments now have to justify themselves in the language of revenue, “deliverables,” and “learning outcomes.” CSU’s new partnership with OpenAI is the latest turn of that screw.

Purser’s analyzes how OpenAI is extracting intellectual and academic labor at CSU and connects it to the immense resource extractions necessary to power genAI systems as well as the hidden labor of workers often in other jurisdictions who check and verify the data within these systems. Folding in questions about data privacy and transparency, Purser suggests that the beyond debates about the value of genAI as an educational technology is the usurpation of the role of educators by technopoly.

Yet perhaps all is not lost, as Purser documents ongoing mobilization and resistance by CSU faculty who are questioning the impacts on their students, many working class, first-generation and marginalized, who are demanding more than being “guinea pigs” for a technopoly.

As Purser argues:

These students understand something that administrators and tech evangelists don’t: they’re not paying for automation. They’re paying for mentorship, for dialogue, for intellectual relationships that can’t be outsourced to a chatbot.

Perhaps therein lies the purpose of the (higher) education in the age of genAI.

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