Brown University Investigating Student Who Emailed 3,805 Non-Faculty Employees To Ask: What Do You Do All Day?
His efforts were modeled after what Elon Musk has done in the Department of Government Efficiency.
MDV Edwards | Shutterstock The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, has captured the attention of people across the country and around the world. It seems that DOGE’s efforts to cut government waste inspired one student to attempt to identify waste at his own school.
The BBC reported that DOGE sent emails out to government employees on February 22, requesting that they list their accomplishments from the previous week. If they refused to comply, they faced termination. The controversial email effort eventually fizzled out, but a Brown University sophomore felt that it was an appropriate measure to take as he sent similar emails to employees at his own college.
A Brown University student emailed non-faculty employees and asked them what they do all day.
Alex Shieh, a sophomore at Brown University, decided he wanted some answers from his school regarding where his tuition money was going, so he took matters into his own hands. Shieh created a website called Bloat@Brown, which served as a “public database,” and used AI to catalogue the names and roles of 3,805 employees at Brown who were not part of the faculty. Shieh wrote a piece on what he called his “journalistic inquiry” for Pirate Wires.
Shieh shared that he completed all of his work in the middle of the night to avoid triggering any filters, “just in case Brown’s IT team felt inclined to block emails from my domain.” He used various sources, including school newsletters and LinkedIn, to find information on Brown’s non-faculty employees. He sorted them into three groups: DEI jobs, redundant jobs, and [expletive] jobs. Shieh was specifically concerned about DEI jobs since the Trump administration had vowed to stop funding colleges that kept DEI hires on staff. The other two categories just seemed unnecessary.
Just as Musk had sent emails to federal workers asking them to list their accomplishments, Shieh posed the question, “What do you do all day?” The reaction was beyond anything he could have expected. He only received 20 emails back, many of which were riddled with profanity. In addition, his Social Security number was leaked, his website was hacked and his email was submitted for junk newsletters, including pornographic ones.
These petty methods were apparently not enough retaliation from Brown’s staff.
The Brown Daily Herald reported that Shieh was under investigation by the university, something he confirmed in the article he wrote. According to the paper’s University News Editor, Elena Jiang, “Shieh was notified of the investigation through a March 20 letter from Associate Director of Student Conduct and Community Standards Kirsten Wolfe. Wolfe wrote that Shieh’s actions may have constituted violations to the ‘Emotional/Psychological Harm,’ ‘Invasion of Privacy,’ ‘Misrepresentation’ and ‘Violation of Operational Rules’ clauses under the code of student conduct.”
Shieh, who said that he launched the investigation to discover where rising tuition costs were going while the university was running on a deficit, has reached out to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). He is strongly fighting back against the university’s charges and investigation, and he’s not alone.
The student has quite a few big names in his corner.
In addition to garnering the support of FIRE, Shieh has become something of a folk hero on social media, where Musk responded to his efforts by saying, “Wow.” Fox News has taken up Shieh’s story, and the official X account for the GOP House Judiciary Committee re-posted Fox’s story with an emoji that indicated they were watching.
Congressman Troy E. Nehls, a member of the Judiciary Committee, shared his own post, in which he said he was sending a letter to Brown’s president “urging her to reconsider any disciplinary action.” In a poll Shieh ran on his own X account, 88.3% of respondents said the university’s actions were “unfair.”
Shieh is in an interesting position. It’s certainly understandable why some are supporting him as he claims to express his First Amendment rights. It should also be noted that Shieh is receiving much more backlash than Musk did himself for doing the same thing on a federal level. However, whether or not this was really the right way to go about addressing this apparent issue is up for debate.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
