Dartmouth's provost warned us about AI cheating—but his own AI use cost him his job
People who love AI don't always love telling others they used it.
On August 9, 2026, while Dartmouth College's provost Santiago Schnell penned an op-ed for The Washington Post titled "Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there’s a deeper problem," he unknowingly foreshadowed his own downfall. This week, Schnell faced a stark reminder of the issue he had highlighted when an advisory committee revealed he had failed to disclose significant use of AI in an academic paper and an op-ed in The Washington Post, despite publishers' stringent disclosure requirements.
Schnell's cooperation with the investigation was notably lacking, leading the committee to describe his response as "insufficient." He did provide his Dartmouth laptop for inspection, but he withheld logs from his personal LLM accounts used for editing and generating content related to the papers in question. Moreover, Schnell refused to meet with the committee, although his use of the Claude enterprise account provided through Dartmouth was accessible to them.
This usage demonstrated his reliance on the LLM for tasks such as revising his papers, debugging code, and editing figures. An example of his AI-assisted work included running his papers through Claude and querying it with prompts like, "Read full article."
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