Arniel won't accept warped soul gem [Arniel's Endeavor]

[Polo]

I gave Enthir the staff and Enthir gave me a warped soul gem to give to Arniel, but whenever I try to interact with him, he just says "I can't lose all my research. There has to be a way to save the college." I looked through the internet to see if anyone had a similar problem; seems there are a lot of bugs with this quest but couldn't find this specific problem.

[True American Patriot]

just kill her and she'll know what it feels like.

[Polo]

Arniel is a guy.

[Eternie]

Make sure you only have one warped soul Gem. See if you can drop it ... (shouldn't be able to if it's the real one the quest is expecting) and pick it up again to see if that makes a difference to his dialogue options.

I would suggest to delete current save, restart computer and load a save before giving the staff to Enthir to see if that fixes the issue.

Otherwise reading through http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Arniel%27s_Endeavor
May give some other hints

[Polo]

I only had one warped soul gem and couldn't drop it.

[Eternie]

Okay ... have you tried reloading a previous save before you handed the staff to enthir,
AFTER restarting your computer.

With skyrim often issues can be fixed by a restarting your computer so that everything is back to basics. Also allowing scripts to finish running ... which sometimes could be just waiting for 2 minutes before talking to an NPC.

[Polo]

That isn't working either.

[Polo]

For anyone looking at this from Google, if Arniel isn't talking to you after Enthir has given you the warped soul gem, I found a way to solve it using console commands.

setstage MGRArniel03 10

Though a duplicate quest in your journal will appear, the first instance is stuck there forever I guess.