Brown University sophomore Alex Shieh wants to take a Department of Government Efficiency-style chainsaw to the college’s bureaucracy — and he started by emailing thousands of school administrators to ask what they do all day.
“I’m a big fan of cutting wasteful spending,” Shieh, 20, told The Post. “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 computer science major had emailed Brown’s 3,805 administrators in March, and, in the style of email Musk sent to federal workers in February, asked 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 fighting multiple counts of school rule violations and faces a disciplinary hearing on Thursday.
“I don’t think it’s inherently antagonistic to ask them what their job is,” the New Hampshire native said. “It’s just journalistic inquiry.”
Shieh, who identifies as a libertarian, complained that there are 3,805 full-time non-professor staff members at Brown — more than one for every two of the school’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 said. “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 part of why tuition costs 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 said.
Next year, the cost to attend Brown is set to be $95,984, according to the school’s website — up from $78,706 in just 2019. Still, the school somehow ran a $46 million budget deficit in 2024.
“Most people can’t afford that, and it threatens meritocracy if this just becomes a place full of rich kids,” he told The Post. “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 university told administrators not to respond to Shieh’s March 18 email, but about twenty already had.
“There were people who sent me real, legitimate responses about their job, and it seemed very important,” he said. But he says other responses were “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 said. “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.”
In addition to sending out his email, Shieh created a database of Brown administrators that scored them on three measures: whether their job is associated with DEI, how redundant their role is, and whether theirs is a “bulls—t job.”
The website was hacked a few hours after it went live and was rendered unusable. He also alleges that someone leaked his Social Security number soon after it went live.
Two days after sending the email, the school notified Shieh he is under investigation for emotional and psychological harm, misrepresentation, a violation of operational rules, and invasion of privacy.
The school 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 charge and told The Post he created the database by scraping available information from LinkedIn and Google and analyzing it with artificial intelligence.
“Those names aren’t confidential,” Shieh said. “Brown publishes the names and their titles themselves. Nothing about this is confidential.”
He was also accused of misrepresentation for saying he was a reporter at the Brown Spectator, because the school says the publication is not recognized by the Student Activities Office.
Shieh sent the email on March 18th, identifying himself as a reporter for the Brown Spectator, a defunct libertarian student newspaper that’s being relaunched by ten students. He took over the role of publisher.
The school dropped that charge after the free speech legal organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) wrote them a letter arguing it violated his expressive rights.
Dominic Coletti, his attorney at FIRE, says Brown appears to be targeting 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 school has since accused the Brown Spectator of trademark violation for using the university in their name. Shieh has to go to an administrative review hearing with deans on Wednesday and faces possible probation.
“Despite continued public reporting that frames this as a free speech issue, it absolutely is not,” Brian E. Clark, a spokesperson for Brown, told The Post. “Brown’s review centers on whether improper use of non-public Brown data or non-public data systems violated law or policy.”
But Shieh isn’t satisfied with how his school is handling the situation.
“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 said. “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 Bill Ackman have both tweeted in Shieh’s defense, and he says he’s been contacted by students at Columbia University in New York who have sent out a similar email to administrators at their own school.
“I think that they misplayed their hand. They just shouldn’t have done anything about it, because it only made the story bigger,” Shieh said.
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