Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
Dartmouth's inquiry into its own provost tests whether campus AI rules reach the top
Dartmouth College is investigating AI use in provost Santiago Schnell's writing after a detector scored his essay on AI cheating 100% AI-written. In his apology he names disclosure as the rule he broke, and a college can apply that rule to its provost and its students alike.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Questions about his writing first surfaced in early August, when Semafor examined AI use on the opinion pages of papers including The New York Times and The Washington Post.
- The flagged Washington Post essay argued that proctored tests and blue books miss the harder question of what a degree certifies, namely that a student can reason independently.
- After Schnell told The Dartmouth he used AI for copyediting and clarity, the paper ran that statement through a detector and it was rated AI-written as well.
- Schnell, a mathematical biologist, became provost in July 2025 after serving as dean of Notre Dame's College of Science.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- precedent Whatever weight Dartmouth gives a detector score in its provost's case is the weight students accused on similar evidence can ask for next.
- exposure Anything a senior leader publishes can be run through a detector by outsiders, as the student paper did with the provost's own explanation.
- constraint Once leaders' own writing is under scrutiny, a college that restricts student AI use without covering its administrators holds a rule students can dismiss as a double standard.
Students describe the case as a question of symmetry. Colleges restrict AI for students while administrators and faculty use it themselves, students say, and they see a double standard when they are penalised for handing academic work to the tools [12]. "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, told The New York Times [10]. The coverage does not describe Dartmouth's rules for student AI use or the standard the investigation will apply. So it is not yet established that the provost did something a student would be disciplined for.
Schnell places the fault in disclosure. "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 in a guest piece for The Dartmouth, adding: "I am sorry that this was not my standard practice and, moving forward, it will be." [9] The essay at the centre of the case had argued that institutions should teach students when to use AI [7].
The case against him rests on detector output. Pangram's classification of the Washington Post essay as 100% AI-written leaves no human share in the text [5]. Schnell's account leaves some: he says he wrote the piece himself, then used ChatGPT to sharpen several arguments and check grammar [8]. The investigation will have to decide how far a detector reading outweighs an author's description of his own process.
A provost's newspaper column is personal writing and a student's essay is graded work, and the two can fairly sit under different rules. The distinction is fair in principle, and rules that differ by role are defensible when they are written down before anyone is caught. It weakens as the work moves closer to scholarship. Faculty members face scrutiny over AI-written research as well as opinion pieces, according to Entrepreneur's account [13], and Schnell has conceded that publications set AI expectations he should have met [9].
The trade-off for anyone drafting an AI policy this quarter is between a use rule and a disclosure rule. A use rule is easier to state and harder to apply to the people who sign off on enforcement. A disclosure rule permits the tool and asks everyone, the provost included, to say when they used it. Schnell adopted that standard for himself after the fact [9]. The first case against a junior employee or a student is likely to be judged against the senior one, and at Dartmouth the senior case is still open [1].
What to watch
- The findings of Dartmouth's investigation, and in particular how much weight it gives the Pangram score against Schnell's account of drafting first.
- Whether Dartmouth writes disclosure requirements for administrators' and faculty members' public writing into its AI rules.
- Whether scrutiny of faculty AI use moves from opinion pages into research published under Dartmouth names.