‘Hypocrisy’: US students are calling out college leaders for using AI

NEW YORK - College professors and administrators have been busting students for cheating with artificial intelligence for several years. Now, the professors and administrators are getting in trouble, too.

Dartmouth College in New Hampshire last week announced it was investigating its provost, Santiago Schnell, after the college’s student-run newspaper found that some of his published writing appeared written by AI.

Schnell, a mathematical biologist, is perhaps the most prominent in a growing cast of college professors and administrators who have been accused of using AI in a way that crosses ethical lines.

There have been instances of opinion articles, research papers and even campuswide messages to students showing traces of AI influence. He issued a statement apologising.

Administrators wring their hands, and sometime issue punishments, when students outsource writing assignments to a robot to save time or avoid the hard work of thinking.

Some students are calling out the examples of faculty doing the same thing as hypocritical.

“It just goes against all the values of our institution and the concept of academia,” Eli Moyse, a Dartmouth senior, said in an interview.

A working group at George Washington University said in a report in August that many students reported “doubts that faculty themselves are using AI ethically and transparently”.

And at Brown University in Rhode Island, a survey found that close to two-thirds of undergraduate students who responded had some worries about faculty members relying on AI to develop course lectures and other content.

At Dartmouth, Schnell’s AI use in public writing came up in an investigation in August by news site Semafor about AI-created writing appearing in the opinion pages of major publications.

That investigation said an Aug 9 commentary by Schnell in The Washington Post was written by AI. The opinion article was about AI cheating in school.

The Semafor investigation also found indications of AI writing in New York Times opinion articles.

The follow-up investigation in September by the student publication, The Dartmouth, found extensive AI use in Schnell’s published work in 2026.

Schnell told The Dartmouth in a statement that he used AI “for language refinement, copyediting, improving clarity and organisation and making writing processes more efficient”.

The newspaper then ran Schnell’s statement on his AI use through an AI detector, which flagged the statement itself as apparently written by AI.

Schnell did not respond to a request for comment.

In a note to her campus announcing the review of Schnell, Dartmouth’s president, Sian Beilock, said that being an early leader on AI was “messy”. Beilock recently called for more AI use at her university.

“There will be mis-steps,” she wrote, “and that’s part of how an institution learns”.

Dartmouth declined to comment beyond what Beilock had already written.

There should also be consequences, said Moyse, who called the AI scandal a “completely cartoonish” display of hypocrisy.

“He should resign immediately or get fired,” he said of Schnell. “Passing something off as your work when it isn’t your work is just plagiarism, even if it’s written by a robot.”

In a letter published on Sept 25 in The Dartmouth, the provost apologised for not always disclosing AI use in his public writing.

“Suffice it to say, I am more aware than ever of the need for robust intellectual discussions about the appropriate use of AI in the higher education landscape,” Schnell wrote.

The scope of AI use by university employees is not entirely clear, but one of the most comprehensive surveys, conducted in the autumn of 2025 by Elon University and the American Association of Colleges and Universities, found that about a quarter of the 1,057 faculty members from across the country who responded were not using generative AI tools.

Meanwhile, polling suggests US college students lean heavily on AI in their coursework. More than half say they use it at least weekly, and one in 5 say they use it every day.

Among faculty, nearly nine in 10 said they were not using AI for grading, according to the Elon survey.

And just 6% said they used AI “a lot” when preparing their own research papers.

Close to half, though, said they turned to AI at least somewhat as they created or changed “traditional assignments”.

At the University of California, Berkeley, the student-run paper, The Daily Californian, ran dozens of campus communications through AI detectors and found that some missives from top administrators were apparently written or altered by AI.

Dan Mogulof, a spokesperson for Berkeley, said in an e-mail that university leaders and communicators were using AI as a tool within certain guidelines and “so long as the final product accurately and authentically captures and expresses the author’s thoughts, perspectives, tone and objectives”.

He added: “We have found that not to be possible without extensive revision, editing and/or embellishment of whatever an AI agent might initially produce.”

Student journalists also tested a long essay published by Berkeley math professor Zvezdelina Stankova in The San Francisco Standard. AI detector Pangram flagged the essay as “33% AI-generated or AI-assisted writing”, the paper wrote.

Stankova, who declined to comment, told the student paper that she had used AI for editing, but the essay, about the shaky math skills of many new Berkeley students, was the result of “intensive human work and deliberation”.

Some schools have specific policies on AI use among employees.

At the University of Southern California, for instance, faculty and staff members cannot use AI to “independently make final decisions” about matters like admissions and discipline.

And USC says that artificial intelligence cannot be used in a way that defies any other university policy.

Still, a set of faculty guidelines for artificial intelligence at USC suggest the balancing act facing many professors: “There is a difference between what you can do with generative AI tools and what you should do.”

Whatever professors decide, the guidelines say, “faculty who require AI disclosure from students should generally hold themselves to the same standard”.

Even when institutions have AI policies in place, they – like most rules anywhere – are not always followed.

Stanford University has a detailed AI policy, for example.

But recently, the university used AI to remove a Hispanic man from a photograph, replacing him with a black woman, and to alter the appearances of two other students in the same image.

After the changes were discovered, the university acknowledged there had been a policy violation.

Experts say the controversies – and the uncertainty over how or whether to respond – can be traced to how quickly the technology is evolving on campuses.

Ethical standards have long governed matters like plagiarism and other forms of academic misconduct, but even written guidelines have not always explicitly kept pace with AI, leaving the normal boundaries murky.

“The big thing is there’s no social contract right now,” said Marc Watkins, who founded the Mississippi AI Institute for Teachers at the University of Mississippi. “We don’t have these sorts of priors to say what’s appropriate and what’s not.” NYTIMES