Dartmouth’s AI Champion Falls to the Transparency Test
Dartmouth’s AI Champion Falls to the Transparency Test
Santiago Schnell’s departure puts Dartmouth at the center of a familiar campus argument with an unusually high-profile protagonist: how to embrace AI without blurring the lines of authorship, disclosure and accountability.
The dispute began against a backdrop of growing concern over student use of generative AI. Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock announced a review of her provost’s work in September, conceding that keeping the college at the forefront of a fast-moving technology would be “messy” and that institutions would make missteps as they learned.
The faculty committee’s subsequent findings went beyond a minor editing dispute. Reviewing logs from Dartmouth’s enterprise AI system, it concluded that Schnell used Claude to substantially edit a research manuscript, troubleshoot coding and generate figures for ChemSystemsChem. The journal required disclosure of that kind of AI assistance, but the review found none at submission or publication.
The committee also examined Schnell’s August Washington Post opinion piece on AI cheating. Schnell said he had used ChatGPT to refine arguments and check grammar before submitting it. Dartmouth concluded that this breached the newspaper’s standards, while also finding that he was not sufficiently forthcoming with investigators and did not meet institutional ethical expectations.
Schnell, Dartmouth’s provost since July 2025 and its chief academic and budget officer, resigned after the review. He did not immediately comment. Beilock characterized the exit as his decision, thanked him for his leadership and named history professor Matthew Delmont interim provost through June 2028.
For Dartmouth, where foundational AI research is a source of pride, the episode is less a repudiation of the technology than a warning about its use. Beilock’s message to the campus was pointed: leaders must model “the transparency and human judgment” expected of students and scholars.
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