Dartmouth Provost Who Warned About AI Cheating Resigns After Investigation of His Own AI Usage

02 Nov 2026, 18:44 by Lucas Nolan · Breitbart

Santiago Schnell, who stepped down this week as provost of Dartmouth College, had built part of his public profile warning that universities weren’t doing enough to fight AI cheating. An internal investigation found he’d failed to disclose his own extensive use of artificial intelligence, including in that very warning.

Ars Technica reports that Schnell wrote a Washington Post op-ed on August 9 titled “Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there’s a deeper problem.” An advisory committee at Dartmouth later found that he had not disclosed significant AI use in that op-ed, nor in at least one academic paper, even though both publishers required such disclosure.

The committee’s report said Schnell showed “insufficient cooperation” during the investigation. He handed over his Dartmouth laptop but did not turn over logs from his personal AI accounts tied to the writings under review, and he declined to meet with the committee. Investigators did get access to his Claude enterprise account, used through Dartmouth, and those logs showed him using the chatbot to revise papers, find and fix bugs in code, and edit or generate figures.

In one exchange cited in the report, Schnell asked Claude to review a paper headed for the journal ChemSystemsChem as though it were a specialist referee. “I am getting read[y] to submit the enclosed paper, its supplementary materials and the enclosed repo to ChemSystemsChem. This paper is not biological, but rather chemical. Imagine that you are a reviewer for this paper with expertise in nonlinear chemical dynamics and mathematical chemical kinetics. What would be your referee report for this paper?” he wrote. He also asked language models to take TeX files, correct files and a code repository, and generate new figures.

The report also describes Schnell uploading a manuscript titled “Academic Freedom and Catholic Mission: The Procedural Overlap Zone in University Governance” to Claude and asking whether it contained “many signatures of AI writing.” He then submitted a revised version incorporating the chatbot’s suggested changes.

Schnell told Semafor he had used AI chatbots “to refine a few arguments” and “check for grammatical errors.” He told one journal editor he had “used AI as an editorial tool” to “help refine sentences, improve clarity, and the expression of arguments.” Asked why he had not disclosed AI use to an academic journal, he said he “did not understand that this type of AI-assisted editing required disclosure.”

The committee wasn’t satisfied it had the full picture. Its report said “the nature of the Provost’s actual AI use” remained unclear, and that his public statements may have understated how much he actually relied on AI tools, noting his use “went beyond his other public” characterizations of it.

The resignation comes weeks after Schnell published his own paper on AI detection, “Who Wrote This?,” in September 2026. In it, he described using OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Pro to examine whether AI-written essays could be identified, framing the project as a kind of reverse Turing test. He wrote that GPT-5.6 Pro proposed structures and titles, identified relevant literature, and generated portions of early drafts, while he chose the problem, journal, audience, and argument direction. He said he used GPT-5.6 Sol for language editing on sections he rewrote himself, and asked both GPT-5.6 Pro and Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1 to critically review the manuscript before submission. He wrote that he takes “full responsibility for the resulting manuscript” and resisted describing AI as a co-author. Even after detailing that AI use in “Who Wrote This?,” Schnell did not disclose AI use in other papers submitted for publication where publishers required it.

Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock, who wrote a September 2026 piece for The Atlantic titled “Why I Want More AI at Dartmouth,” announced Schnell’s resignation and said transparency and human judgment should be the standard for school leaders.

Breitbart News previously reported on the “Cobra Effect” of AI detection tools, which are causing students to write simpler and less descriptive essays:

Writing instructors and students across educational institutions are discovering an unintended consequence of AI detection tools: rather than simply identifying machine-generated text, these systems are fundamentally reshaping student writing practices in concerning ways. The tools, which rely on statistical analysis rather than genuine comprehension of authorship, are penalizing sophisticated writing while rewarding generic, algorithm-friendly prose. A striking example emerged when a student’s essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron received an eighteen percent AI-generated score from a detector pre-installed on a school-issued Chromebook. The trigger was a single word: “devoid.” When the student replaced this term with the simpler word “without,” the AI detection score dropped to zero, despite no changes to the essay’s underlying structure or ideas. This incident illustrates how current detection systems function on surface-level statistical signals such as word choice and distribution rather than meaningful assessment of authorship. The technical foundation of these detectors contributes to the problem. AI detection tools estimate the probability that text was machine-generated by analyzing features including token frequency, syntactic patterns, and burstiness, which refers to variation in sentence length and structure. Students have learned that certain stylistic markers can trigger higher detection scores, while flatter, more generic text tends to pass unnoticed. This creates a rational but problematic response: students either deliberately simplify their writing or use AI models to generate statistically safe phrasing that blends into the background.

Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall, author of the New York Times Bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI, understands the danger of unintended consequences of advanced technology. Hall explains, “America has one foot in the roses of possibility and promise of technological innovation, and one foot hovering over the landmines that we are going to have to collectively navigate our way though as a society. Every one of those landmines touches every policy specialty that the conservative movement has entered.”