Artificial intelligence is dominating the news these days, and nowhere is AI more of a buzzword (or a buzzkill) than in the K-16 education world.
Last June, The New York Times Magazine highlighted AI and its impact (or misguided impact) at San Jose State University:
“Last spring, newly admitted students to San Jose State University received an unusual video message from the institution’s president, Cynthia Teniente-Matson. …’Congratulations on your admission,’ she said. ‘At SJSU, you’ll have opportunities to dive in the technologies shaping the world today, and redefine what’s possible for tomorrow.’”
“This was not, in fact, Teniente-Matson addressing the new class, but her brand-new custom A.I. avatar. ‘I’m thrilled to share this special moment with you,’ the avatar said. ‘It’s only fitting, isn’t it?’ After all, technology is a cornerstone of what makes San Jose State University such an incredible place to learn, innovate, and grow.’”
“The avatar is one feature of SJSU’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 the California State University – 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.)”
“At San Jose State – the oldest public university in the California State University system – the shift toward A.I. is evident across campus. The university now has an A.I. librarian, and its main library features a new A.I. Center for Civic and Social Good. The business school runs an A.I. boot camp for high school students; the campus career hub is sponsored by Adobe; A.I. literacy training is an orientation requirement and, last year, an A.I. agent helped coordinate commencement logistics.”
“The C.S.U. is promising that the A.I. Initiative will prepare its students to be workers of the future. The only issue is that, at this moment of technological acceleration and flux, we don’t yet know what the workplace of the future will look like. A year into this experiment, no one can tell how it will end. Will these graduates be ahead of the curve in the new A.I. economy, or robbed of a chance to hone their critical thinking skills? If adopting A.I. eases their entry into the work force, might it also hinder their intellectual development in unforeseen ways?”
“On campuses across the university system, the initiative has stoked backlash. The C.S.U. faculty union has organized against the contract with OpenAI, which is set to expire in June. Against the backdrop of a systemwide financial crisis that has driven California’s public universities to the breaking point, many professors find the initiative incoherent and unsettling. Though they’ve been encouraged to use the technology to support their research and teaching, there is no clear sense of what exactly that means. They look around and see the infrastructure that once supported public education in California crumbling, while next door, the world’s richest companies are reaping record returns.”
Last month, the New York Times reported on the resignation of Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher warning all of us about the dangers of AI, and whether Coxon’s warnings should be considered:
“Depending on your feelings about artificial intelligence, the Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon’s resignation this month could be interpreted as a courageous act of truth-telling, an outburst of sci-fi-addled alarmism or an elaborate media stunt.”
“But to Coxon himself, it was clearly at least one more thing: a plea for labor action.”
“’If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like,’ Coxon wrote, after disclosing that he and many of his former colleagues believe A.I. could extinguish humanity. ‘Should you put your head down because ‘it’s happening anyway’ – or take this moment to call for different conditions?’”
“Coxon and the A.I. researchers who echoed his plea on social media seemed to be making a simple calculation. That if anyone’s going to save our species from the uncomfortably high risk of apocalypse, it’s not going to be A.I executives or investors or the Trump administration – all of whom generally want to speed up development rather than slow it down. To the extent there’s likely to be a savior, Coxon seems to believe, it’s going to be the workers.”
The Times article goes on to mention this type of “worker” warning had occurred at least on more time during America’s history:
“…the Nobel Prize-winning chemist and Manhattan Project contributor Harold Urey knew how to capture the public imagination when he wrote about nuclear weapons in early 1946.”
“’I write to frighten you,’ Urey began an essay in Collier’s that he co-wrote with a publicist. ‘I’m a frightened man, myself. All the scientists I know are frightened – frightened for their lives – and frightened of your life.’”
Although the Truman administration wanted to put atomic power in the hands of the U.S. government and military, Congress passed a law forming the Atomic Energy Commission, a group of civilians charged with developing a strategy for how our country would live with nuclear power moving forward.
It seems like civilians – civilians who currently serve as the AI researchers, engineers, and technicians – are the ones best suited to slowly bring the rest of us along as we attempt to learn what this intelligence can do for us and what safeguards must be placed toward its potential.
San Jose State University shows us, at least in the education world, why a slow pace is needed. After millions of dollars invested, no one on that campus seems to understand how AI should be used moving forward. Maybe that university, and others like it, will develop a plan to effectively implement AI, but its clear that is going to take time.
Disruption doesn’t have to be costly. Change can be safe and prosperous for all.
Til tomorrow. SVB
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