Dartmouth College provost Santiago Schnell resigned from his position after an advisory committee concluded that he failed to disclose significant AI use in an academic paper and a Washington Post op-ed. The resignation follows an op-ed published by Schnell on August 9, 2026, titled “Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there’s a deeper problem,” which highlighted academic integrity challenges before Schnell encountered his own disciplinary review.
Investigation and Investigation Findings
The advisory committee faced difficulties during its inquiry, noting in its report that Schnell exhibited “insufficient cooperation.” While he surrendered his Dartmouth laptop, Schnell declined to provide logs from his personal large language model accounts related to the disputed texts and did not meet with the investigative committee.
Investigators nevertheless secured access to the institutional Claude enterprise account that Schnell utilized through Dartmouth. Review of this account revealed that Schnell employed the LLM to revise papers, troubleshoot and correct code errors, and edit or produce figures. In one instance documented by the committee, Schnell prompted the AI by asking it to evaluate a manuscript slated for submission to the journal ChemSystemsChem from the perspective of an expert reviewer in nonlinear chemical dynamics and mathematical chemical kinetics.
Schnell’s Defense and Statements
Schnell maintained throughout the process that his utilization of artificial intelligence was restricted to an editorial aid and conversational partner rather than a tool to generate whole manuscripts. He explained to Semafor that chatbots served to “refine a few arguments” and “check for grammatical errors.”
In correspondence with a journal editor, Schnell stated that he “used AI as an editorial tool” to “help refine sentences, improve clarity, and the expression of arguments.” He defended his failure to disclose the assistance to an academic journal by explaining that he “did not understand that this type of AI-assisted editing required disclosure.”
Despite publishers maintaining clear requirements for AI disclosure, Schnell’s resignation was finalized after the advisory committee determined his omissions violated academic standards regarding transparency.
