Brown University student reporter under fire for DOGE-like email: "What have you accomplished this week?"
FIRE demands that Brown University to drop the charges that are warrentless.
After a DOGE-inspired student journalist experiment, Brown University student Alex Shieh will face a disciplinary hearing next Wednesday because he sent 3,805 administrators at Brown an email asking them to justify their bureaucratic positions.
Shieh, a sophomore at the school sent the following email to Brown University all 3,805 administrators. The school immediately told administrators not to respond, and Shieh only got 20 emails back, most of them hostile.
For his curiosity at where his $93,000 tuition goes, Shieh now faces a disciplinary trial that could land him on probation, suspension, or expulsion.
Additionally, Shieh sent all bureaucrats a link to the website “Bloat@Brown” where they could view whether their jobs involved illegal DEI work as well as if the administrators had been found to be antisemitic. Since its initial publication, it seems Shieh has disabled some of the functionality of the site, including the antisemitism search feature.
He explained on X that:
“Administrators were analyzed in three domains, legality, redundancy, and bullshit jobs, and those who raised the algorithm’s suspicion have been flagged for manual review” Shieh wrote on X.
“Despite budget shortfalls that leave dorms flooding when it rains, Brown currently boasts 3,805 non-instructional full-time staff members on payroll — a staggering number considering Brown currently has 7,229 undergraduate students” Shieh wrote.
Brown officials are now viciously going after the student, dubious claiming that the Asian American student activist misrepresented himself as a student reporter (which he was), according to The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Additionally, the school is requesting the student handover any “confidential data” he uncovered. But what confidential data? The school won’t say. Shieh maintains everything he found was public information.
All the information for his investigation, he says, scraped publicly available data and then fed it into an AI algorithm.
Shieh’s challenge to Brown University’s administrative bloat seems inspired by President Trump’s right-hand man, Elon Musk, who has also been recently attacking the bloated bureaucracy of the federal government.
ALEX’S FREE SPREECH RIGHTS AND DUE PROCESS
As FIRE previously noted:
“Brown University President Christina Paxson declared in a recent letter that Brown will defend free expression against encroachments from the federal government. Shieh’s case suggests that her promise does not extend to Brown’s own encroachments on free expression.”
In an interview, Shieh said with a tinge of pride: “Brown is retaliating against me for exposing that the exorbitant tuition costs are going to a bloated bureaucracy, not educating students.”
In a X poll sent to his followers three days ago, the student asked the public if it would be fair for Brown University to charge him with “misrepresentation” and abuse of the school’s IT policy. Over 5,000 people voted, with 88.9% of X users saying he was unfairly targeted.
“It is no surprise that the House Judiciary Committee has opened an investigation into Brown and other Ivy League schools for price-fixing and other anticompetitive business practices, such as requiring students to purchase on-campus housing and meal plans, which may operate at a surplus in order to subsidize the administrative costs,” he added.
In an interview, Shieh said, “Of course they’re going to have to throw something at me after I expose all the waste at a school like Brown.”
“This is unmeritocratic and unAmerican if schools are supposed to be places where the most meritorious students go end up being a playground for the wealthy” he added.
MORE SCHOOLS SUBJECT TO ACCOUNTABILITY
Since Sheih launched the Bloat@Brown tracker, he also launched similar trackers at Columbia University, Cornell University, and Penn University.
Earlier in the week, Shieh appealed to his X, asking them to protect his “free speech”.
In a letter sent to Brown University officials today by FIRE’s Dominic Coletti, he argues that the school is baselessly retaliating against the student.
“Brown’s own expressive promises bar it from punishing Shieh for his use of “Brown” in the registration for The Brown Spectator. Its late-breaking attempt to do so cannot be understood as anything other than pure retaliation.
“Accordingly, we request that Brown drop the trademark charge and follow its own policies by providing sufficient notice of and evidence supporting the ‘violation of operational rules’ charge, or else drop the investigation entirely at its May 2 hearing with Shieh.”
Brown University did not respond to an inquiry by publication.
This piece was brought to you by Toni Airaksinen, Senior Editor of Liberty Affair and a journalist based in Boca Raton, Florida. Follow her on X @Toni_Airaksinen, and on Instagram, where she frequently posts about Israel and antisemitism.
Defund Brown.
Mr. Shieh is my idea of a great American. But I've always wondered how much "freedom of speech" students get to exercise. It took me a while to figure out that success in academia is achieved by telling the professors what they want to hear.