Dartmouth provost resigns over undisclosed AI use

Dartmouth provost Santiago Schnell resigned this week after an advisory committee found he failed to disclose significant AI use in an academic paper — and in a Washington Post op-ed titled "Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there's a deeper problem."

The op-ed ran on August 9, 2026, with Schnell positioned as a voice of institutional concern about AI in academia. The committee found that the publishers of both the paper and the op-ed required disclosure of AI use, and that Schnell did not provide it. His stated defence was that he "did not understand that this type of AI-assisted editing required disclosure."

The committee's evidence came from the one account Schnell could not refuse to hand over: the Claude enterprise account he used through Dartmouth. Its logs showed him using the model to revise papers, fix bugs in code, and edit or generate figures — including one exchange in which he told Claude he was ready to submit a paper and its supplementary materials to the journal ChemSystemsChem, and asked the model to act as a reviewer with expertise in nonlinear chemical dynamics.

He also uploaded the manuscript of a forthcoming article on academic freedom and Catholic university governance and asked Claude: "Are there many signatures of AI writing in this article?" — then submitted a revised version incorporating Claude's suggestions.

The committee described his conduct during the investigation as "insufficient cooperation": Schnell surrendered his Dartmouth laptop but declined to turn over logs from his personal LLM accounts and declined to meet with the committee. It concluded that his public statements may understate his actual AI use.

The institution at the centre of this has a particular stake in the AI story. Dartmouth claims it launched the field in 1956, when the term was coined at its summer workshop. This term the college is hosting a conference called "What Must Remain Human?", featuring a student hackathon sponsored by Anthropic and talks from Mira Murati and Yann LeCun.

Students caught submitting undisclosed machine-written work face expulsion. The provost who warned about them in the Washington Post wrote his own warning with undisclosed machine assistance, checked it for AI fingerprints, and handed in the revision.