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The nation’s largest public four-year university may soon be barred from replacing faculty with generative AI as a bill backed by a union of professors comes nearer to reaching the governor’s desk.
Few examples exist of the California State University’s attempting to replace faculty labor with generative AI tools, but the faculty union wants to prevent such efforts from ever getting off the ground. The bill so far has garnered no opposition from lawmakers and may clear the Legislature as soon as Monday.
“We do have some cases of the potential replacement of faculty work by AI, and so I personally am very concerned about closing the barn door after the horse has already gotten out,” said Kevin Wehr, a professor of sociology at Sacramento State, which is part of the Cal State system. Wehr leads the bargaining team for the faculty union, the California Faculty Association.
“We're trying to keep ahead of a rapidly changing set of technologies,” he said in an interview.
Wehr and other faculty and union representatives Calmatters spoke with are especially alarmed about Cal State because of the system’s growing embrace of generative AI tools. Cal State signed a $17 million contract with ChatGPT last year to provide all students and faculty access to the company’s suite of education offerings.
A survey released by Cal State in the spring found that just over half of faculty reported AI affecting their teaching negatively. Just one-third of students indicated that their professors teach them how to use AI effectively, CalMatters reported. Cal State has since renewed its contract with ChatGPT, paying the company $13 million annually for the next three years, according to LAist.
Cal State is one of several state agencies flagged in a government report that uses “high risk” AI tools, CalMatters reported. Those include cheating detection software for students taking exams remotely.
Already, the system’s use of AI is creating tension between faculty and administrators.
Next month, the state labor relations board will hold a meeting over the system’s purchasing of AI tools such as ChatGPT. The union filed an unfair labor practice charge last year when the system rolled out its new pivot toward AI.
In 2025 the faculty union filed a separate complaint with the labor board that Sacramento State was considering deploying AI chatbots that fed off the course material professors voluntarily submitted, a claim Cal State refuted. The union also contested an administrator’s proposed written recommendation that students seek out mental health support through AI tools in the event campus counselors weren’t available.
Cal State and the union settled the matter in March and the union withdrew its complaint. Sacramento State agreed that it wouldn’t “implement autonomous programs or bots with the primary purpose of performing bargaining unit work or evaluating faculty” without meeting and conferring with the union first.
“Many institutions of higher education are exploring options to integrate AI into their courses and curriculum,” said the bill’s author Sen. Sabrina Cervantes, a Democrat from Riverside, at a bill hearing in June. “In many instances, this has been done without any boundaries or guardrails.”
California Faculty Association represents coaches and mental health counselors in addition to professors. It has donated at least $3.4 million to state legislators and other candidates for state office since 2020. Cervantes has gotten at least $64,650 from the union since 2016, according to Digital Democracy, a CalMatters government disclosure tool.
Cal State has no position on the bill, but the role of AI broadly is a sticking point in ongoing labor contract negotiations between the union and the university system.
A dispute over bots at Sacramento State
The California Faculty Association filed unfair labor practice charges against Sacramento State with the California Public Employment Relations Board last winter over what it said were campus efforts to replace some of the work of faculty, which the union maintained violated state labor law.
CalMatters obtained these records through a California Public Records Act request.
The union alleged that Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin, the campus’s then chief AI officer, created a mental health chatbot for students and included a link to it in a resources webpage for students. The complaint indicates that the link was accompanied by the statement, “AI is better than nothing, when a counselor isn’t available.”
In a response, Cal State’s chancellor’s office wrote to the labor board that the union’s claims of unfair labor practices were bogus. Sidorkin didn’t develop any such bots and “there was no implementation of any AI bots to do any counseling work.”
CalMatters spoke with Sidorkin by phone this week. Prior to the call, he had no knowledge that he was named in the complaint. Sidorkin called the union’s allegation “a misstatement of the fact.” He never created a bot, he said, but merely recommended that students use ChatGPT if they cannot find a counselor.
Sidorkin, who has a new book out on using AI to teach in universities, said Sacramento State terminated the position of chief AI officer last April during a wave of systemwide layoffs and the campus took down the website affiliated with that role.
He remains at the university as a professor of education and is a union member. Sidorkin shared a copy of the proposed syllabus language that he archived. He still stands by his recommendation that students be informed in their course syllabus that an AI tool during a mental health episode is better than nothing.
The Hornet Commons student housing complex at California State University, Sacramento, in Sacramento on July 13, 2022. Photo by Rahul Lal, CalMatters Patrick Oberle, an associate professor of geography at Sacramento State and a union member, said the faculty association took up the issue because it represents counselors who the university could attempt to outsource. CalMatters spoke with him before speaking with Sidorkin.
The union filing also alleges that Sidorkin created an AI-powered tool to interpret the faculty union’s contract with the university system. The union argued this too violated state labor relations law and that the tool itself produced incorrect information. “When the union objected, the CSU ceased use of the contract interpretation bot,” the complaint read.
And Sidorkin solicited faculty for their course syllabi and materials “to receive a customized AI tutoring bot for their classes.” The complaint included an email from Sidorkin to faculty that Sac State leaders told him to retract the request, though he seemingly opposed the move.
“This technology is available on the open market through multiple platforms; however, you will not be able to build them through my office at this time,” he wrote then. He told CalMatters that some 18 professors sent their course material to him the first day he invited submissions.
A human resources director at Sacramento State wrote to a faculty member reassuring her that any bots by administrators need to be bargained over between the union and Cal State “before being used, posted, published, shared, or distributed,” according to a copy of the email.
Sidorkin told CalMatters that the union’s filing the charges was a mistake.
“It’s not a good PR move also on the union's side because they look like they're Luddites, and this is not true,” he said, adding that dozens of faculty at Sacramento State alone have developed AI chatbots in support of their courses for students after Cal State purchased ChatGPT accounts for faculty and students last year.
“I am disappointed in my union,” he added.
Faculty fears of AI mission creep
Oberle, the professor, fears that without guardrails, a university could chip away the work of instructors in ways that hurt student learning and diminish the joy of teaching.
One concern? That a campus may encourage professors to shift more of their grading to AI to then grow the number of students per class. That hasn't happened in a formal way, yet.
That would mean less human engagement with instructors for students. And it could reduce the need to hire additional professors as others retire, which would limit the power of the faculty union.
“We're trying to accommodate the folks who are deeply opposed to AI's very existence, and also accommodate the folks that are very excited about all of its possibilities,” Oberle said.
The point of the unfair labor practice charge, he said, wasn’t to tie the hands of Cal State administrators, but to underscore that using AI to potentially replace labor requires a conversation with faculty.
More battles over AI in the workplace
Cervantes’ bill is one of several in California aimed at curbing the role of artificial intelligence in the workplace, but others are far more divisive. Senate Bill 947, would prevent employers from relying solely on AI tools to discipline or dismiss employees. That legislation has the support of labor unions and some nonprofits skeptical of generative AI. Business groups oppose it, including the California Chamber of Commerce as well as ride-hail company Lyft. Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a similar bill last year.
Another, Senate Bill 903, would ban psychotherapists from offering therapy through chatbots and place other limits on the use of AI tools in transcribing patient sessions or communicating with patients. It would also ban bots from making independent therapeutic decisions. The California Chamber of Commerce and California Medical Association oppose it.
“We know technology can augment humans, but it should never replace humans,” said Assemblymember Mike Fong, a Democrat from Alhambra and chair of the Assembly’s committee on higher education, when speaking about Cervantes’ Cal State faculty bill.
Moments later, the committee voted 10-0 to pass the measure.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
