Dartmouth Provost Resigns After Probe Found Undisclosed AI Use in His Own Writings

Santiago Schnell has resigned as provost of Dartmouth College in Hanover after an internal investigation found he failed to disclose his own extensive use of artificial intelligence in published work, including in an op-ed where he warned universities weren’t doing enough to combat AI cheating among students.

Schnell wrote a Washington Post op-ed published August 9 titled “Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there’s a deeper problem.” A Dartmouth advisory committee later determined he had not disclosed significant AI use in that piece, nor in at least one academic paper, despite both publishers requiring such disclosures.

The committee’s report described “insufficient cooperation” from Schnell during the investigation. He turned over his Dartmouth-issued laptop but did not provide logs from personal AI accounts connected to the writings under review, and he declined to meet with investigators directly. Investigators did obtain logs from his Claude enterprise account, accessed through Dartmouth, which showed him using the chatbot to revise papers, find and fix bugs in code, and edit or generate figures.

In one exchange cited in the report, Schnell asked Claude to act as a specialist peer reviewer for a paper he intended to submit to the journal ChemSystemsChem. “I am getting read[y] to submit the enclosed paper, its supplementary materials and the enclosed repo to ChemSystemsChem,” he wrote. “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?”

The report also found that Schnell uploaded a manuscript titled “Academic Freedom and Catholic Mission: The Procedural Overlap Zone in University Governance” to Claude and asked whether it showed “many signatures of AI writing,” then submitted a revised version based on the chatbot’s suggestions.

What Schnell has said

Schnell told Semafor he had used AI chatbots “to refine a few arguments” and “check for grammatical errors.” He told one journal editor he had “used AI as an editorial tool” to “help refine sentences, improve clarity, and the expression of arguments.” Asked why he hadn’t disclosed AI use to an academic journal, he said he “did not understand that this type of AI-assisted editing required disclosure.”

The committee said it remained uncertain about “the nature of the Provost’s actual AI use,” and found his public statements may have understated his reliance on the tools, noting his actual use “went beyond his other public” characterizations of it.

The resignation follows a paper Schnell published in September 2026, titled “Who Wrote This?,” examining whether AI-written essays could be detected. In that paper, he disclosed using OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Pro to propose structures and titles, identify relevant literature, and generate portions of early drafts, while saying he chose the problem, journal, audience, and argument direction himself. He wrote that he takes “full responsibility for the resulting manuscript.” Despite that disclosure in one paper, he did not disclose AI use in other submissions where publishers required it.

Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock, who authored a September 2026 piece for The Atlantic titled “Why I Want More AI at Dartmouth,” announced Schnell’s resignation and said transparency and human judgment should be the standard expected of school leaders.