The story behind the cartoon
Dartmouth provost Santiago Schnell resigned on October 28 after a faculty-led committee concluded he used AI to meaningfully alter his writing and fell short of the school's academic integrity standards. President Sian Leah Beilock convened the committee on September 25, after a Semafor investigation in August and a student-newspaper follow-up flagged his published writing; he had been set to face a faculty no-confidence vote in less than two weeks.
The committee pointedly did not use AI detectors: it worked from Dartmouth's enterprise Claude logs and his emails, finding Claude substantially edited a research manuscript after peer review, troubleshot code, and generated figures — and that Schnell asked Claude whether a forthcoming article bore many signatures of AI writing, then submitted a revised version incorporating its suggestions.
He gave inspectors his Dartmouth laptop but did not hand over logs from personal AI accounts or meet at the requested time. The irony: Dartmouth calls itself the birthplace of AI, hosted the field's founding 1956 workshop, and is holding an 'AI at 70' conference this week, while history professor Matthew Delmont serves as interim provost through June 2028.
The joke is the receipt that never ends: the provost's own Claude logs print out in one long strip from under his desk, across the office floor, and into the hands of three investigators who just keep reading. No detector, no verdict from a machine — just the paper trail, longer than the room.
THE PROOF CAME WITH BUGS.
THE KING COMES TO COLLECT
HE HELPED HIMSELF
THE SINGLE SOCKET.