Moyse: Fire Provost Santiago Schnell

The Dartmouth’s and Semafor’s reporting has exposed that College Provost Santiago Schnell has an AI dependency. It’s time for him to step down. 

There’s no way to tell how much Provost Schnell used artificial intelligence when he wrote “Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there’s a deeper problem.” for The Washington Post. Although Provost Schnell told The Dartmouth that he has used AI to edit some of his writing, there’s no way to tell how much he actually used it to write any of the numerous works that journalists at The Dartmouth investigated. 

But we have the next best thing. If you haven’t read the investigations recently published in this newspaper and in Semafor, I encourage you to. The information journalists have collected is enough for any reasonable person to come to the conclusion that Provost Schnell used AI heavily over and over again — more than he admits — to write or at least substantially edit his publications. Pangram, the software used to test whether Provost Schnell’s writing was AI generated, has a near-zero false positive rate, according to research from the University of Chicago. 

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the overwhelming irony of it all: Our provost was caught using AI to draft an article about AI, and he was ratted out by an AI checker that is itself powered by an incredibly advanced AI algorithm.

The provost is the College’s chief academic officer. They oversee all academic affairs. This includes curriculum development, managing all faculty, tenure decisions and academic planning. When they publish something in a major newspaper, they represent all of Dartmouth’s academics on the national and international stage. They should be the very embodiment of our rigorous academic standards. 

I would argue that Provost Schnell’s job is one of the most respected in all of academia. 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. 

If true, Provost Schnell’s use of AI in academic publications is arguably a graver violation. He repeatedly outsourced his intellectual labor and then tried to pass off work that wasn’t his under his name. Even if it wasn’t human work, passing work that is not your own off under your name still constitutes clear plagiarism — probably the very worst academic violation a faculty member can commit. 

On top of this, if he did use AI more extensively than he admits, Provost Schnell lied by omission. One of the Provost’s own employees, economics professor Paul Novosad, told The Dartmouth that individuals who want to understate their AI usage say what Provost Schnell said when defending his article. 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. We are told time and time again that this principle is one of, if not the most important part of our academic life at Dartmouth. It is described by the College on its website as “foundational to a Dartmouth education.” 

Provost Schnell didn’t just use AI to write a paper for his professor to read. If Pangram’s reports are ultimately true, he used it to write an article that could presumably be read by tens of thousands of people across the world. He used it extensively in academic writing on consequential subjects and he used it to write the response to our journalists about using AI.

Beyond the Provost Schnell incident, though, lies a deeper reality: Dartmouth’s administration is focusing too much on AI. College President Sian Leah Beilock published an article in The Atlantic about embracing AI. The College signed onto a partnership with Anthropic and Amazon Web Services, and is working to create an AI student wellness platform in Evergreen. We are even hosting a special “AI at 70” conference in October. It’s starting to feel like a top-down preoccupation with the buzz and PR potential of AI is coloring every major choice made by administrators, and Provost Schnell’s use of AI is the natural consequence of this push. A fetishization of AI to earn publicity for the College has rotted the brain of our top academic, the very person supposedly in charge of helping us learn how to use it. 

I understand how Provost Schnell got to this point. His use of AI is reflective of trends affecting our collective mind. I have seen many of my own peers fall down the same path of increasingly using AI because it’s addictingly easy. As I wrote last week, while I agreed with President Beilock that we need to integrate AI into learning at the College, she has fundamentally misunderstood “learning.” The same lesson applies here. It’s undeniable that we need to learn how to coexist with and use AI responsibly. But before we adopt this policy and then make a very public push about it, our own faculty needs to get a handle on it. Until then, dismissing blue book exams and AI restrictions in the classroom as Luddite is irresponsible and wrong.

So many amazing things happen in classrooms at Dartmouth every day, and so few of them include AI. Shouldn’t our administrators’ schedules reflect this balance? The provost should be overseeing departmental planning about academics, meeting with faculty members and thinking about how we can improve learning at Dartmouth. He should be engaging constantly with academics on our campus, not rushing to tell the rest of the world about our new policies. In this time of uncertainty about the future of learning, the provost’s job is incredibly important. Provost Schnell is not the leader who will help our school develop a responsible relationship with AI. He must be fired.

Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.