Dartmouth Provost Resigns Over Undisclosed AI Use in Writing

Three months after telling Washington Post readers that colleges had a "deeper problem" with AI cheating, Dartmouth College provost Santiago Schnell resigned after an advisory committee found he had used AI tools in his own writing without disclosing it, according to Ars Technica.

Schnell's Aug. 9, 2026, op-ed, "Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there's a deeper problem," argued that higher education needed to get serious about artificial intelligence in student work. A Dartmouth faculty committee later concluded Schnell had not followed the same standard, finding he failed to disclose significant AI use in that op-ed and in an academic paper, even though both publishers required disclosure, Ars Technica reported.

What did the Dartmouth committee actually find?

Investigators obtained Schnell's Claude enterprise account, issued through Dartmouth, and found a pattern of use: running finished drafts through the chatbot for editorial feedback, fixing bugs in code, and generating or editing figures. In one exchange cited by the committee, Schnell asked Claude to act as a peer reviewer with expertise in "nonlinear chemical dynamics and mathematical chemical kinetics" and produce a mock referee report on a paper he was submitting to the journal ChemSystemsChem.

The committee's report, described by Ars Technica, says Schnell showed "insufficient cooperation" with the inquiry. He handed over his Dartmouth laptop but did not turn over logs from his personal LLM accounts tied to the writings under review, and he declined to meet with the committee directly.

What does Schnell say he did with AI?

Schnell has not described his AI use as ghostwriting. 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" to "help refine sentences, improve clarity, and the expression of arguments." Asked why he hadn't disclosed that to the journal, he said he "did not understand that this type of AI-assisted editing required disclosure."

Why didn't the committee take him at his word?

The panel wrote that Schnell's public statements may understate "the nature of the Provost's actual AI use," and that his actual practice regularly "went beyond his other public descriptions of his use of AI in writing," according to Ars Technica's account of the report. Without his personal chat logs, the committee said it could not establish the full scope of what he did.

What changes at Dartmouth now?

Schnell is no longer provost as of this week, Ars Technica reported, following the committee's findings. The case lands at a moment when journals and universities are writing new rules on AI disclosure in research and public writing — rules Schnell himself had been urging campuses to take more seriously just months earlier.

How can writers avoid the same problem?

The dispute boils down to paperwork, not just ethics: publishers increasingly require authors to say, in writing, when a chatbot touched their draft. Faculty who use AI editing tools regularly may want something that keeps that record automatically rather than relying on memory months later. Apps like AlterEgo market themselves around that kind of transparent, logged assistance, which is the exact gap the Dartmouth committee said it couldn't close.