At the eighth weekly Dartmouth Student Government meeting of the term on Nov. 9, all senators who spoke raised concerns about Evergreen.AI, which they will share with the Board of Trustees in an upcoming presentation on Nov. 18. More than 100 undergraduates at Dartmouth are currently developing Evergreen, which promises to be the first college-specific wellness artificial intelligence.
General senator Trace Ribble ’29 said he noticed a growing “problem” of students using AI as a mental health resource.
Ribble said he recently spoke with several mental health professionals at the National Mental Health Conference about their opinion on “using Evergreen for mental health” — and received negative feedback across the board.
“Every single one disapproved of the idea of using Evergreen for mental health, so I feel like that might be a concern,” Ribble said.
Evergreen is currently in a closed, year-long beta test in which students will use pre-structured dialogues rather than large-language model prompting. Ribble said that “people who are fairly familiar with the inner workings” of the project were concerned that “a lot” of those students were using ChatGPT to develop their responses.
“You’re not teaching Evergreen not to be AI,” Ribble said. “You’re just perpetuating the problem that is already in our generation, which is using ChatGPT for therapy.”
Project director Ana Arzoumanidis ’28 agreed with Ribble about his concerns of using AI as a mental health tool, adding that the College is using Evergreen as a “replacement” for in-person psychologists.
“Given the shortage of in-person psychologists that we have here and [Evergreen] being the replacement for that, I think a lot of people are very concerned about outsourcing intimacy, which I think is a valid concern,” Arzoumanidis said.
In response to these concerns, College spokesperson Jana Barnello wrote in a statement to The Dartmouth that Evergreen “is not AI therapy and it is not replacing any existing Dartmouth resources.” Students hired by Evergreen “have been instructed not to use any GenAI to complete their work” and developers are “closely monitoring” the quality of the students’ work as it is developed,” she added.
North Park senator Jude Poirier ’28 said he believed DSG should recommend to the Trustees that the College fund more in-person counseling options to support mental health on campus.
“We should emphasize to them that it is dystopian that we’re spending $15 million on training a chatbot when we could be spending a million dollars a year on actual therapists,” Poirier said.
The current estimated price tag for Evergreen is $16.5 million and will be funded entirely by parent and alumni donations, The Dartmouth previously reported.
The Senate also discussed annual funding projects. Student body president Sabik Jawad ’26 shared that DSG received 10 applications for IdeaLab — a DSG grant program that supports student wellness initiatives— and is “comfortable” funding four of the projects based on their effectiveness towards supporting students.
The projects approved are: Fruitful Study Sessions, guided study sessions with fresh fruit provided; Mindful Play, a video game mindfulness activity that was approved last year; Recovery Lab, a three-part wellness series that brings guest speakers and recovery equipment to campus and CourseMe.ai, a student-run website that provides information on classes and professors at Dartmouth.
Ranvir Deshmukh ’26, who created, manages and funds CourseMe.ai, applied for IdeaLab funding because it is “difficult for him to keep it going,” Jawad said. Funding from IdeaLab would go towards Google Cloud fees, the domain, email and user feedback incentives for CourseMe.ai, Jawad explained. The Senate did not discuss other projects in detail.
The Senate unanimously approved $4,500 in funding for the four IdeaLab projects.
The Senate also approved $15,000 to give $10 Amazon gift cards to students who complete the student issues survey, an annual survey DSG uses to inform their work and advocacy efforts.
During the closed session of the meeting, DSG failed an impeachment trial for a senator who failed to meet Elections Planning and Advisory Committee eligibility requirements by a vote of six to 15. According to the DSG constitution, impeachment requires a two-thirds majority vote of “all eligible Senators” and results in immediate removal. Jawad declined to identify the accused senator based on “past precedent.”
Poirier said he was frustrated by the results of the impeachment trial and that DSG failed to act on the “constitutional violation.”
“DSG just entrenched a culture of doing nothing through a formal vote,” Poirier said.
DSG Senate meetings occur weekly on Sundays at 7 p.m. in Collis 101 and are open to all students.
Ana Arzoumanidis ’28 is an opinion writer for The Dartmouth. She was not involved in the writing or editing of this article.
