A top administrator at Dartmouth College resigned after a faculty committee determined that he had improperly failed to disclose the use of artificial intelligence in some of his academic and public writing, the school announced Wednesday.
The committee found that the school’s provost, Santiago Schnell, used AI to alter his work in violation of the requirements of an academic journal and failed to disclose his use of AI as required by a newspaper where his writing appeared. Schnell was not forthcoming about his AI use, the committee concluded, and fell short of school standards including its code of ethical conduct.
At a moment when college students are increasingly coming under scrutiny for their use of AI, Schnell is the most prominent academic known to have stepped down over the issue.
Questions about Schnell’s use of AI in his writing have drawn national attention as universities navigate the risks and opportunities of the rapidly advancing technology.
At Dartmouth, where research on AI was born and is celebrated, the issues are particularly fraught.
In September, Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock announced the review of Schnell’s work and acknowledged the complexity.
“I’ve committed to keeping Dartmouth at the forefront of AI and that includes acting in an ethical manner. Leading on something this new and fluid is messy,” she wrote. “There will be missteps, and that’s part of how an institution learns.”
Schnell, a mathematical biologist from Venezuela, has been the school’s provost — a title that essentially means chief academic officer and chief budget officer — since July 2025. He did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
In reviewing logs of Dartmouth’s enterprise AI tool, the committee concluded that Schnell had used Claude to substantially edit a research manuscript, troubleshoot coding errors and generate figures for the journal ChemSystemsChem.
The committee found that Schnell had submitted prompts such as, “Do you find any scientific issue with the paper, problem or contradiction that it would prevent me to submit it?” The publication at the time required AI use of this kind to be disclosed, the committee wrote, but Schnell did not do so at the time of submission or publication.
In August, Schnell wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post headlined “Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there’s a deeper problem.” Schnell told the online news outlet Semafor that he had used ChatGPT to “refine a few arguments, check for grammatical errors, and submit it to the Washington Post.” That was a violation of The Post’s standards, the committee wrote.
The committee found that Schnell did not sufficiently disclose AI use to some publications, and that he had delayed and failed to provide answers to committee requests.
Schnell’s resignation was first reported by the Dartmouth, the campus newspaper.
Beilock said that it was Schnell’s decision to leave the university, out of respect for his colleagues and the institution. “We remain grateful for his leadership and wish him well,” she wrote.
Matthew Delmont, a professor of history and an associate dean of faculty for international and interdisciplinary studies, will serve as interim provost through June 2028, Beilock told the campus community.
“Each of us brings a different perspective on how and when to incorporate AI into our work and our lives,” she wrote. “Moreover, keeping Dartmouth at the forefront of AI inevitably means leading through an environment that is fluid and fast-changing. That is why, as leaders, it is so critical that we model the transparency and human judgment that we expect from our students and scholars.”
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