Dartmouth's Provost Warned About AI Cheating, Then Resigned Over His Own Undisclosed AI Use

On August 9, Dartmouth provost Santiago Schnell published a Washington Post op-ed titled "Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there's a deeper problem." This week he resigned, after an advisory committee found he had failed to disclose significant AI use in an academic paper and in that very op-ed, even though the publishers required disclosure.

The irony is easy to enjoy. The harder part is that Dartmouth calls itself the place where AI was launched in 1956, and its top academic now says he did not understand what the rules asked of him.

What the logs showed

The committee's report, detailed by Ars Technica, complains of "insufficient cooperation." Schnell turned over his Dartmouth laptop but not the logs from personal LLM accounts tied to the writings in question, and he did not agree to meet the committee.

It did get his Dartmouth Claude enterprise account. That record shows him using the chatbot to revise papers, find and fix code bugs, and edit or generate figures. In one prompt, he asked Claude to imagine being a reviewer with expertise in nonlinear chemical dynamics and write a referee report on a paper he was about to submit to ChemSystemsChem. He also asked an LLM to take TeX files and "make the corrections to the files, and the repo," generating new figures if needed.

The most awkward exchange involves a forthcoming manuscript titled "Academic Freedom and Catholic Mission: The Procedural Overlap Zone in University Governance." Schnell uploaded it and asked Claude, "Are there many signatures of AI writing in this article?" He then submitted a revised manuscript with the kinds of changes Claude suggested.

"An editorial tool"

Schnell's defense has been that this was light work. He told Semafor he used chatbots "to refine a few arguments" and "check for grammatical errors." He told a journal editor he "used AI as an editorial tool." He also said he "did not understand that this type of AI-assisted editing required disclosure."

The committee believes his public statements may understate "the nature of the Provost's actual AI use," and that he regularly "went beyond his other public descriptions of his use of AI in writing."

Schnell did know how to disclose. In "Who Wrote This?", a September paper on AI detection, he spelled out that GPT-5.6 Pro proposed structures, found literature and generated portions of early drafts, and that he rewrote most of it. He wrote that "contribution and authorship are different roles" and that the human author must take full responsibility. On other papers where publishers required disclosure, he made none.

A campus still betting on AI

Dartmouth, meanwhile, wants more AI, not less. President Sian Leah Beilock wrote "Why I Want More AI at Dartmouth" in The Atlantic in September. In announcing the departure, she said that "as leaders, it is so critical that we model the transparency and human judgment that we expect from our students and scholars."

The college is also hosting a conference called "What Must Remain Human?", complete with a student hackathon sponsored by Anthropic. Survey data unveiled there: 70 percent of college students say take-home work has become unfair because of AI, and 39 percent feel pressured to use it because their peers do. Among Dartmouth students, 92 percent fear AI can hurt writing skills.

Campuses elsewhere are fighting over the same ground from the opposite direction. At the University of Kentucky, an employee just won a religious accommodation to refuse using AI at work.

At least one student had already reached a verdict. In a September op-ed, Eli Moyse argued that Schnell should be fired because "a fetishization of AI to earn publicity for the College has rotted the brain of our top academic." Schnell was not fired. He resigned, and nobody writing the rules seems to agree yet on what disclosure means.

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