A sophomore at Brown University is facing disciplinary action after he sent a DOGE-like email to non-faculty employees asking them what they do all day to try to figure out why the Ivy League’s tuition has gotten so expensive.
“Brown is charging me for misrepresentation — for saying I am affiliated with the Brown Spectator, which I am, because the Brown Spectator is an independent non-profit and not a registered student group,” Alex Shieh told Fox News Digital in an emailed statement.
“Brown is also charging me for violating their IT policies for publishing Brown employee data, without specifying which provisions of the IT policy were violated,” Shieh added.
He maintains, however, that he did not violate “any provisions of the IT policy.”
During free weekends in March, Shieh went to the common room in his dorm’s basement — a space that floods when it rains and requires plastic tarps, despite the school’s $90,000 yearly tuition — and used AI to try to determine what Brown employees did and why the school was so expensive.
The sophomore then created a database of the 3,805 non-faculty employees who worked at Brown University and emailed them to ask, “What do you do all day?”
In the inquiry, he said that he identified himself as a journalist for The Brown Spectator, a dormant on-campus libertarian journal that a group of students is planning to relaunch.
He formatted his database to identify three particular jobs: “DEI jobs, redundant jobs, and bulls–t jobs.”
Shieh said he wanted to investigate DEI because of President Donald Trump’s executive orders, and his administration threatening to withhold federal funds to universities with DEI policies. The goal was to get as much data as possible so that his research could be accurate.
But only 20 of the 3,805 people emailed responded, and many of the responses were profane and hostile.
Shieh also said that his Social Security number was leaked.
“Brown is retaliating against me for exposing that the exorbitant tuition costs are going to a bloated bureaucracy, not educating students,” Shieh told Fox News Digital in the email statement.
“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.
Shieh continued, “Because Brown can’t outright punish me for calling out their hypocrisy, they are instead accusing me of committing obscure conduct violations that are not applicable to my situation, in order to scare other students from speaking out.”
In an April 23, 2025, post on X, Elon Musk replied to Shieh’s post announcing the school’s disciplinary action with the word, “Unreal.”
Brown administrators say Shieh’s case has nothing to do with free speech.
“In spite of what has been reported publicly framing this as a free speech issue, it absolutely is not,” Brian Clark, vice president for news and strategic campus communications, said in an email statement to Fox News Digital.
“At the center of Brown’s review are questions focused on whether improper use of non-public Brown data, non-public data systems and/or targeting of individual employees violated law or policy.”
“Brown has detailed procedures in place to investigate alleged conduct code violations, resolve them and implement discipline in instances when students are found responsible, and these will continue to guide our actions,” Clark added. “Students have ample opportunity to provide information and participate directly in that process to ensure that all decisions are made with a complete understanding of the circumstances.”
Clark said that the school “is proceeding in this matter in complete accordance with free expression guarantees and appropriate procedural safeguards under Brown policies and applicable law.”
Shieh, however, said that he is expanding his initiative to look at other Ivy League institutions, including The University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Cornell University “to expose wasteful expenditures there, and released an online tool to demand that schools cease and desist DEI.”
He said that the database has been used already by members of the public hundreds of times.
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