Brown College sophomore Alex Shieh needs to take a Division of Authorities Effectivity-style chainsaw to the school’s forms — and he began by emailing hundreds of faculty directors to ask what they do all day.
“I’m a big fan of cutting wasteful spending,” Shieh, 20, advised The Submit. “This is no different to what Elon Musk is uncovering in the federal government,” he added, referring to the DOGE head and Senior Advisor to President Donald Trump.
The pc science main had emailed Brown’s 3,805 directors in March, and, within the type of e mail Musk despatched to federal staff in February, requested them to “explain [their] role,” “describe what tasks [they] performed in the past week,” and “explain how Brown students would be impacted if [their] position was eliminated.”
Now he’s preventing a number of counts of faculty rule violations and faces a disciplinary listening to on Thursday.
“I don’t think it’s inherently antagonistic to ask them what their job is,” the New Hampshire native stated. “It’s just journalistic inquiry.”
Shieh, who identifies as a libertarian, complained that there are 3,805 full-time non-professor employees members at Brown — a couple of for each two of the college’s 7,272 undergraduates.
“Bureaucrats don’t feel any pain if they’re wasting a bunch of money by hiring a bunch of assistants or telling their underlings to do stuff that is useless,” he stated. “Their assistants become a status symbol themselves, like, ‘Hey, I have a lot of assistants. I must be a pretty important guy.’”
This, he believes, is a part of why tuition prices are skyrocketing.
“Across the Ivy League, the price of tuition is rising far faster than inflation, and it seems to correlate very strongly with the number of non-professor staff members and administrators,” Shieh stated.
Subsequent 12 months, the fee to attend Brown is about to be $95,984, in response to the college’s web site — up from $78,706 in simply 2019. Nonetheless, the college one way or the other ran a $46 million price range deficit in 2024.
“Most people can’t afford that, and it threatens meritocracy if this just becomes a place full of rich kids,” he advised The Submit. “They’re running a huge deficit every year while charging students the price of a luxury car. There’s something wrong with the finances.”
The college advised directors not to reply to Shieh’s March 18 e mail, however about twenty already had.
“There were people who sent me real, legitimate responses about their job, and it seemed very important,” he stated. However he says different responses had been “profane.”
“Some administrators are useful, no doubt, but probably not all of them, because the university functioned fine back decades ago when there were half the number,” he stated. “They have some very bureaucratic titles with a lot of ‘associates’ and ‘vices’ and other prefixes, but it’s unclear what they actually do, and they’re hesitant to respond.”
Along with sending out his e mail, Shieh created a database of Brown directors that scored them on three measures: whether or not their job is related to DEI, how redundant their position is, and whether or not theirs is a “bulls—t job.”
The web site was hacked just a few hours after it went stay and was rendered unusable. He additionally alleges that somebody leaked his Social Safety quantity quickly after it went stay.
Two days after sending the e-mail, the college notified Shieh he’s underneath investigation for emotional and psychological hurt, misrepresentation, a violation of operational guidelines, and invasion of privateness.
The college is accusing Shieh of accessing a “proprietary University data system which maintains confidential human resources, financial, and student information and [using] this information to produce a publicly available website, resulting in emotional distress for several University employees.”
He denied the cost and advised The Submit he created the database by scraping accessible data from LinkedIn and Google and analyzing it with synthetic intelligence.
“Those names aren’t confidential,” Shieh stated. “Brown publishes the names and their titles themselves. Nothing about this is confidential.”
He was additionally accused of misrepresentation for saying he was a reporter on the Brown Spectator, as a result of the college says the publication shouldn’t be acknowledged by the Pupil Actions Workplace.
Shieh despatched the e-mail on March 18th, figuring out himself as a reporter for the Brown Spectator, a defunct libertarian scholar newspaper that’s being relaunched by ten college students. He took over the position of writer.
The college dropped that cost after the free speech authorized group Basis for Particular person Rights and Expression (FIRE) wrote them a letter arguing it violated his expressive rights.
Dominic Coletti, his legal professional at FIRE, says Brown seems to be concentrating on Shieh’s journalistic freedom: “This is all based on [Shieh’s] reporting. That is the core of what Brown is investigating here… It’s obvious that they don’t like what Alex has reported, and the actual charges themselves all stem from the production of his reporting.”
The college has since accused the Brown Spectator of trademark violation for utilizing the college of their title. Shieh has to go to an administrative assessment listening to with deans on Wednesday and faces attainable probation.
“Despite continued public reporting that frames this as a free speech issue, it absolutely is not,” Brian E. Clark, a spokesperson for Brown, advised The Submit. “Brown’s review centers on whether improper use of non-public Brown data or non-public data systems violated law or policy.”
However Shieh isn’t glad with how his college is dealing with the state of affairs.
“I thought that with all the scrutiny about free speech and about universities’ federal funding that they were going to be on their best behavior and very permissive of journalistic freedom,” Shieh stated. “I think there’s something wrong with the culture at Brown, because people aren’t accepting of any sort of scrutiny whatsoever.”
Musk and fellow billionaire Invoice Ackman have each tweeted in Shieh’s protection, and he says he’s been contacted by college students at Columbia College in New York who’ve despatched out an analogous e mail to directors at their very own college.
“I think that they misplayed their hand. They just shouldn’t have done anything about it, because it only made the story bigger,” Shieh stated.
