Dartmouth's provost warned us about AI cheating—but his own AI use cost him his job

Judgment

Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock and faculty leaders now must decide whether to codify a leader-specific AI disclosure rule, accepting that enforcement may deter open AI use but clarify what counts as misconduct.

Basis

An advisory committee found that Provost Santiago Schnell failed to disclose significant AI use in an academic paper and in his August 9, 2026 Washington Post op-ed; the report cites “insufficient cooperation,” saying he turned over his Dartmouth laptop but not personal LLM logs and did not meet the committee. Dartmouth’s Claude enterprise account showed him using the LLM to revise papers, find and fix code bugs, and edit or generate figures. Schnell told Semafor he used chatbots “to refine a few arguments” and “check for grammatical errors,” and told a journal editor he used AI as an editorial tool; he said he “did not understand that this type of AI-assisted editing required disclosure.” The committee said his public statements may understate his actual AI use. President Sian Leah Beilock wants more AI at Dartmouth and wrote in September that leaders must model “transparency and human judgment” expected of students and scholars.