“I felt a moral obligation of leaving Notre Dame and serving on an Ivy to protect higher education,” Schnell told EWTN News during a recent interview at Dartmouth, where he’s served as chief academic officer since the start of the 2025-26 academic year.
In many ways, to protect higher ed from itself.
In recent years, American higher ed have been engulfed in crisis. Many universities — Ivy and otherwise — have become known more as havens for illiberal activism than the liberal arts. The Trump administration has responded by cutting billions of dollars of federal funding, while seven out of 10 Americans told Pew Research in October that they believe higher ed is “going in the wrong direction.”
“The Ivies have served as a role model in a very negative way on how higher education should be moving forward,” said Schnell. “And the time for reform has arrived.”
At Dartmouth, Schnell believes he has joined a leadership team trying to correct course, by “bringing higher education back to its original roots”: the pursuit of truth, beauty and friendship.