Dartmouth provost resigns over undisclosed AI use

A faculty committee at Dartmouth found its provost, Santiago Schnell, used AI to meaningfully alter his writing. He resigned on October 28 and is leaving the university. The committee used his chat logs in its review. He had been provost, the university's top academic officer, for just over a year.

It started with Semafor, a news outlet that ran guest columns in major newspapers through an AI detector called Pangram. Schnell's August 9 Washington Post column, about universities fighting AI cheating, scored 100% AI-written. Schnell told Semafor he used ChatGPT to refine a few arguments and check grammar. The committee said that was a clear violation of the Post's policy. A detector score is not proof on its own. The committee's own finding is narrower than 100%. It says AI meaningfully altered his writing.

Keep reading — what to watch

Will other institutions start checking their leaders' writing this way? The committee judged Schnell by the university's academic integrity standards. Watch whether newspapers tighten their AI rules for guest columns. Watch, too, whether Dartmouth says more about what the review found.