Dartmouth Provost Resigns After Failing to Disclose AI Use in Own Scholarship

In August 2026, Santiago Schnell, provost at Dartmouth College, published a Washington Post opinion piece titled "Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there's a deeper problem." Days ago, Schnell confronted that very problem when he resigned following an advisory committee's determination that he had used artificial intelligence substantially in an academic paper and the same op-ed without making required disclosures to publishers.

The investigation revealed what the committee described as "insufficient cooperation" from Schnell. While he provided his Dartmouth laptop, he declined to share logs from personal large language model accounts connected to the disputed writings and refused to meet with investigators. The committee did obtain access to Schnell's Claude enterprise account through Dartmouth, which demonstrated his use of the LLM for revising papers, debugging code, and creating or modifying figures.

One exchange showed Schnell asking Claude to evaluate his work as if reviewing it for a journal:

I am getting read[y] to submit the enclosed paper, its supplementary materials and the enclosed repo to ChemSystemsChem. This paper is not biological, but rather chemical. Imagine that you are a reviewer for this paper with expertise in nonlinear chemical dynamics and mathematical chemical kinetics. What would be your referee report for this paper?

Santiago Schnell, in Claude logs reviewed by the committee

Schnell has characterized his AI engagement as editorial assistance. He told Semafor he employed chatbots "to refine a few arguments" and "check for grammatical errors." When speaking with a journal editor, he stated he "used AI as an editorial tool" to "help refine sentences, improve clarity, and the expression of arguments." Schnell claimed he had not disclosed this AI use to academic journals because he "did not understand that this type of AI-assisted editing required disclosure."

Yet the committee expressed skepticism about the completeness of Schnell's account. Investigators concluded that his public statements likely downplayed "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." The committee also documented instances where Schnell asked LLMs to modify TeX files directly, requesting that the system "make the corrections to the files, and the repo. If you have to generate new figures, please provide them to me."

One particular exchange raised questions about Schnell's intentions. According to the committee report, Schnell uploaded a manuscript titled "Academic Freedom and Catholic Mission: The Procedural Overlap Zone in University Governance" to Claude and posed this question:

Are there many signatures of AI writing in this article?

Santiago Schnell, in Claude logs reviewed by the committee

Schnell subsequently submitted a revised version incorporating Claude's suggested modifications. Regardless of how one interprets his conduct, Schnell consistently neglected to disclose his AI involvement, a requirement imposed by publishers.

Schnell's Own Framework for AI Authorship

In a September 2026 paper titled "Who Wrote This?" examining AI detection tools, Schnell himself articulated a nuanced position on the human-AI boundary. He argued against viewing authorship as a simple binary of "human-written" versus "AI-written," contending instead that future work would inevitably blend human judgment with AI assistance. For Schnell, the essential requirement was that the human author assume complete responsibility for the final text, irrespective of its composition method.

In that paper, Schnell detailed his methodology at considerable length:

In September 2026, I asked OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Pro whether an AI-written essay could ever be identified with certainty, and I suggested connecting the problem to Turing's imitation game and to the "reverse" Turing test posed by AI-text detection. GPT-5.6 Pro connected the question to binary hypothesis testing and statistical decision theory, proposed early structures and titles, identified candidate literature, and generated portions of early drafts. I chose the problem, journal, audience, and eventual direction of the argument. I decided which examples and results should remain central, including the decision to retain the Liang study while confronting it with important counterevidence. I checked the cited literature, rejected or corrected claims that I judged inaccurate, corrected mathematical and conceptual errors, and reorganized the argument. In revising the manuscript, I rewrote most sections and added substantial explanations. I occasionally asked GPT-5.6 Sol to provide language-editing assistance for sections I had rewritten. I created the figures and made the final decisions about the mathematics, interpretation, sources, organization, and wording. I take full responsibility for the resulting manuscript. Before submitting the manuscript for publication, I also asked GPT-5.6 Pro and Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1 to review it critically and identify issues that reviewers might raise. I evaluated the issues they identified and made corrections where I judged them warranted.

Santiago Schnell, in "Who Wrote This?"

Despite extensive AI involvement, Schnell rejected the notion of AI as a "co-author." He wrote that "Calling [the paper] 'coauthored' would introduce a different confusion. Mathematical tools have long made substantive contributions without thereby becoming authors… The point is not that the software contributed nothing. It is that contribution and authorship are different roles." While Schnell demonstrated support for transparency by documenting his methods, he failed to apply this principle when submitting other papers to publishers who explicitly required such disclosure.

Dartmouth's Conflicted Stance on AI

Despite the Schnell affair, Dartmouth is advancing its AI agenda. The institution positions itself as the birthplace of artificial intelligence, tracing this claim to 1956 when "the term was coined and the foundational question was asked: Can machines solve problems once reserved for human minds?" The university is organizing a conference titled "What Must Remain Human?" featuring a student hackathon sponsored by Anthropic and speakers including Mira Murati and Yann LeCun.

Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock has signaled her commitment to expanding AI on campus. She authored a piece for The Atlantic in September headlined "Why I Want More AI at Dartmouth." However, Beilock emphasized that institutional leaders must "hold themselves to the highest standards," which she identified primarily as a matter of disclosure.

In her statement regarding Schnell's resignation, Beilock wrote that "each of us brings a different perspective on how and when to incorporate AI into our work and our lives. Moreover, keeping Dartmouth at the forefront of AI inevitably means leading through an environment that is fluid and fast-changing. That is why, as leaders, it is so critical that we model the transparency and human judgment that we expect from our students and scholars."

Student Confusion and Pressure

Survey results presented at this weekend's conference reveal widespread uncertainty among undergraduates about AI use. According to the data, 61 percent of college students believe AI helps clarify difficult material, and half report producing stronger work after discussing problems with AI systems. However, the picture darkens when examining fairness concerns: "70 percent of the college students in the survey indicate that take-home work has become unfair due to AI, with 39 percent feeling pressured to use it because their peers do." At Dartmouth specifically, 92 percent of students worry "that AI can hurt writing skills." Many students also overestimate their classmates' AI adoption.

Not all Dartmouth students have remained silent on the Schnell matter. In a September op-ed, student Eli Moyse called for Schnell's termination, arguing that "a fetishization of AI to earn publicity for the College has rotted the brain of our top academic."