Dartmouth's provost warned us about AI cheating—but his own AI use cost him his job

On August 9, 2026, 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." Little did he know, this op-ed would soon lead to his resignation from the university.

The story took a dramatic turn when an advisory committee delved into the case and found that Schnell had not been transparent about his significant use of AI in an academic paper and the op-ed itself. Despite publishers' requirements for such disclosure, Schnell failed to provide comprehensive cooperation in the investigation, earning the committee's report a term: "insufficient cooperation."

Although Schnell willingly handed over his Dartmouth-issued laptop, he withheld logs from his personal AI accounts used in the creation of the questioned works. Moreover, he declined to meet with the committee, which did receive access to the Claude enterprise account he utilized through Dartmouth. This account demonstrated his use of the large language model (LLM) for tasks like revising papers, identifying and fixing coding errors, and editing or generating figures.

For example, Schnell would feed his papers into Claude and ask it questions such as, "Read full article." These actions, while seemingly innocuous, raised serious concerns about academic integrity and the use of AI in scholarly work.