An investigation suggests Dartmouth provost Santiago Schnell relied on AI for public writing. The episode raises questions about disclosure, the nature of writing, and institutional expectations for academic leaders.
Dartmouth student journalists and Semafor’s probe found pieces attributed to Provost Schnell that scored as 100% AI-written by the Pangram detector.
Students and some faculty view undisclosed AI use by a chief academic officer as hypocritical, especially when institutional policies penalize students for undisclosed AI-assisted work.
The episode spotlights broader campus debates over whether and how universities should guide, disclose, and set norms for AI use in academic writing.
Dartmouth's provost has stopped "writing." --> Skip to main content Opinion Columns Just Visiting Advertisement September 24, 2026 AI for Me, but Not for Thee Dartmouth's provost raises a tension we should examine. By John Warner Inside Higher Ed Dartmouth College provost Santiago Schnell no longer appears to write his opinion pieces and academic articles. At best, Provost Schnell has swapped out writing for AI-assisted text generation.
I know this because that last sentence is one that an AI model would not write, but which I took great pleasure in doing, enjoying the redundancy and the (arguable) "rule"-violating choice of stringing those adverbs together. Is it meaningful for the chief academic officer to choose to engage in automation-assisted (or fully automated) text generation for public writing? I've argued that the "worst" use case of generative AI is writing because of the way automated text production inevitably distorts the writing process and the experience of writing.
This news is the byproduct of an investigation by Dartmouth college student journalists piggy-backing on an investigation by the Semafor website, which tried to determine which guest opinion pieces in major newspapers had been AI-written as determined by the Pangram AI-checking program. This is not sitting well with at least some students. In an opinion piece, Eli Moyse, a senior government studies and creative writing major calls for Provost Schnell to be fired, highlighting what he believes to be an untenable hypocrisy of Schnell using AI to produce a Washington Post op-ed about students cheating by using AI.
This needs to be a cardinal principle of any future AI regulation
Every few months, the AI doomsayers find another reason Americans should fear the technology they are building. Now Anthropic’s CEO, a leading voice in that campaign , wants governments to coordinate limits on increasingly powerful models. Dario Amodei says he opposes a blanket moratorium. He calls for “pacing the fron
Matthew Butterick: So let’s not take the bait. Nor overcomplicate. We needn’t spin our collective wheels spitballing answers to big-picture, long-term Al-policy questions. We don’t know enough yet. The best next steps are the concrete ones: Big Al needs to follow all current laws — just like everyone else. So far — the
From Inside Higher Education: “[R]esearch, published in the journal Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, found that generative AI tools such as ChatGPT `do not reliably reproduce human judgement in the marking of extended written work.’ . . . In all but one case [out of 50], the AI models typically returned hig
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