Dartmouth College provost Santiago Schnell is facing a bit of a reckoning right now after being busted for using AI to write articles that were published in newspapers and academic journals — with some students calling for him to be fired.
The accusations first came from a broader Semafor investigation published last month that looked into how many guest opinion pieces in the US’s top newspapers were written with AI. One of Schnell’s columns in The Washington Post, when put through the widely-cited AI detector Pangram, came up as 100 percent AI-written. The article’s topic, in a detail rich with irony, was AI cheating in colleges.
That sparked a follow-up investigation by the university’s student-run paper, The Dartmouth, which examined Schnell’s published work before and after the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022. Using Pangram, it found that all his works written before that date all came up as 100 percent human written, while a selection of nine of his published works after that date came up with a median score of 96 percent AI written.
In a statement to The Dartmouth, Schnell fessed up to using chatbots in his writing process, though he still claimed ultimate authorship over his manuscripts and insisted that AI only had a modest influence on the final product, using it solely for tweaks like “language refinement” and copyediting.
“I develop ideas and arguments, conduct the research, evaluate the evidence and sources, determine the structure, prepare drafts and decide what appears in the final text,” Schnell wrote. “I regard these technologies as assistive tools,” he continued, adding that they were no “substitute for my research, intellectual judgment or authorship.”
In another ironic twist pointed out by the student journalists, Schnell’s statement also came back as 100 hundred AI-written.
Asked to explain himself out of this one, Schnell wrote a follow-up saying he first wrote a draft and then “used an Al tool to assist with language and clarity,” and so forth and so forth.
“I am fully responsible for any text under my signature,” he asserted.
Students weren’t buying Schnell’s explanations. A day after The Dartmouth released its investigation, it also published a fiery piece by its opinion editor Eli Moyse, a government and creative writing major, excoriating Schnell’s actions and calling in the headline to “Fire Provost Santiago Schnell.”
Calling Schnell’s AI usage an “insult,” Moyse zeroed in how secretly using AI in his published writing — including in a piece about AI cheating, as a reminder— was an offense that, if committed by a student, would be treated as a serious academic infraction.
“If students at Dartmouth used AI to write an entire paper without acknowledgement and then submitted it to their professor, they would be in clear violation of the Academic Honor Principle,” Moyse wrote.
“I would argue that Provost Schnell’s job is one of the most respected in all of academia,” he continued. “So, if he has been using AI as extensively as is suspected, his decision to do so to write an article published in a newspaper of record is an incredible, almost unbelievable insult to our community and to the readership of the Washington Post.”
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