“Ask not for whom the bell tolls, educators and journalists, it tolls for thee”
The academy and the media have, for some time now, worked overtime to position themselves beyond parody. It’s paid off.
From the most recent of an exhausting series of examples, I give you Dartmouth College provost Santiago Schnell, who, after spending the better part of a career positioning himself as an expert on AI in higher education, has been exposed for using AI to wholly (or almost wholly) generate recent opinion pieces in major newspapers and scholarly work in academic journals, without attribution.
You simply can’t make this stuff up. Some things parody themselves better than anything else possibly can.
Schnell, who is currently under investigation by a committee convened at the behest of the president of Dartmouth College, was exposed through parallel investigations by Dartmouth student journalists and the boondocks news website, Semafor, using Panagram to determine how much of Schnell’s recent academic and opinion work was AI-generated.
The answer, according to The Dartmouth, was astounding. “Schnell’s works published in 2026 have a median ‘AI-written’ text percentage of 96%.”
It gets better, when The Dartmouth reached out to Schnell for comment, his reply, via email, was found to be 100% AI-written by Panagram. A recent Schnell op-ed column in The Washington Post, Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there’s a deeper problem, was flagged by Panagram as 100% AI-written.
What Schnell lacks in originality, he more than makes up for in consistency. There’s that, at least.
