Key Takeaways
- Dartmouth College is investigating its provost, Santiago Schnell, after its student newspaper found apparent AI use in work published under his name.
- Faculty members are facing scrutiny over AI-written opinion pieces and research.
- Students see a double standard when colleges penalize them for outsourcing academic work to AI but allow similar use by institutional leaders.
Dartmouth College recently said it would investigate allegations of a professor’s AI use. Students say the controversy reflects a broader double standard: Colleges restrict the technology for students while administrators and faculty embrace it themselves.
According to a recent report from The New York Times, Dartmouth College students are calling out a top professor for allegedly using AI to help with writing.
“It just goes against all the values of our institution and the concept of academia,” Eli Moyse, a Dartmouth senior studying government and creative writing, said in an interview with the Times. He called the situation a “completely cartoonish” display of “hypocrisy.”
The school’s provost, Santiago Schnell, faced allegations of AI use last week from the college’s student-run newspaper, which detected AI in some of his published writing. The college said it was launching an investigation into the written work.
Schnell said in a statement to the student-run newspaper, The Dartmouth, that he used AI “for language refinement, copyediting, improving clarity and organization and making writing processes more efficient.” The newspaper ran his statement through an AI detector, which said that Schnell had used AI to write it, too.
Allegations recently surfaced
At Dartmouth, questions about Schnell’s use of AI in his published writing first surfaced in early August, when Semafor investigated AI’s growing presence on the opinion pages of major newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post.
The report found that AI detection tool Pangram classified an essay published by Schnell in The Washington Post in August as 100% AI-written. The essay was titled, “Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there’s a deeper problem.”
In the essay, Schnell wrote that universities are turning to proctored tests and blue books to curb AI cheating, but those measures to not address the larger challenge. The real problem is what a degree is meant to certify. Schnell said degrees show that a student can independently reason through problems and create solutions.
He wrote that institutions should teach students when to use AI.
Public apology
Schnell said he wrote the opinion piece himself, then used ChatGPT to sharpen several arguments and check grammar. Last week he submitted a guest piece in The Dartmouth apologizing for his AI use.
“In retrospect, I now realize I should always explicitly disclose use of AI in my public writing and be attentive to the expectations of AI use set by publications,” he wrote. “I am sorry that this was not my standard practice and, moving forward, it will be.”
Schnell is a mathematical biologist whose research examines how molecular processes connect health and disease.
He was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, and earned a biology degree from Universidad Simón Bolívar and a Ph.D. in mathematical biology from the University of Oxford. He became provost of Dartmouth in July 2025 after serving as dean of the University of Notre Dame’s College of Science.
Key Takeaways
- Dartmouth College is investigating its provost, Santiago Schnell, after its student newspaper found apparent AI use in work published under his name.
- Faculty members are facing scrutiny over AI-written opinion pieces and research.
- Students see a double standard when colleges penalize them for outsourcing academic work to AI but allow similar use by institutional leaders.
Dartmouth College recently said it would investigate allegations of a professor’s AI use. Students say the controversy reflects a broader double standard: Colleges restrict the technology for students while administrators and faculty embrace it themselves.
According to a recent report from The New York Times, Dartmouth College students are calling out a top professor for allegedly using AI to help with writing.
“It just goes against all the values of our institution and the concept of academia,” Eli Moyse, a Dartmouth senior studying government and creative writing, said in an interview with the Times. He called the situation a “completely cartoonish” display of “hypocrisy.”