Brown University Student Faces Discipline for DOGE-Inspired Email Challenging Bureaucracy
After a DOGE-inspired student journalism experiment, Brown University sophomore Alex Shieh now faces a disciplinary hearing for emailing 3,805 administrators and asking them to justify their bureaucratic roles.
Shieh sent a single email to all non-instructional staff at Brown University, simply asking: “What have you accomplished this week?” The school quickly instructed administrators not to respond. Only 20 people replied, most of them hostile.
For this act of curiosity—rooted in concern over Brown’s $93,000 annual tuition—Shieh now faces a disciplinary process that could result in probation, suspension, or expulsion.
In addition to the email, Shieh linked recipients to a website he created called Bloat@Brown, which allowed users to search for administrator names to see whether their jobs were flagged as illegal DEI roles or whether they had been associated with antisemitism. Some of the site’s functionality—such as the antisemitism filter—has since been disabled.
On X (formerly Twitter), Shieh wrote:
“Administrators were analyzed in three domains: legality, redundancy, and ‘bullshit jobs.’ Those who raised the algorithm’s suspicion were flagged for manual review.”
One archived version of the site stated:
“Despite budget shortfalls that leave dorms flooding when it rains, Brown currently boasts 3,805 non-instructional full-time staff members — a staggering number considering Brown has only 7,229 undergraduate students.”
Now, Brown University is aggressively pursuing disciplinary action against Shieh. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the school falsely claims that Shieh misrepresented himself as a student journalist—even though he is one.
Administrators are also demanding that Shieh turn over unspecified “confidential data.” But according to him, no confidential data was ever accessed—the website was built by scraping publicly available information and running it through an AI algorithm.
Shieh’s project appears to have been inspired, at least in part, by Elon Musk—who has similarly criticized bureaucratic bloat in both government and academia. Musk’s retweet of Shieh’s work brought national attention to the controversy.
Free Speech & Retaliation Concerns
FIRE has taken up Shieh’s case, pointing to hypocrisy from Brown leadership. As the organization 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 stated:
“Brown is retaliating against me for exposing that the exorbitant tuition costs are going to a bloated bureaucracy—not educating students.”
In a poll posted to X, Shieh asked whether it was fair for Brown to charge him with “misrepresentation” and violating IT policy. Out of over 5,000 votes, 88.9% said he was being unfairly targeted.
He added:
“It’s no surprise the House Judiciary Committee is investigating Brown and other Ivy League schools for price-fixing and anticompetitive practices—like requiring on-campus housing and meal plans, which may run surpluses to subsidize admin costs.”
“Unmeritocratic and Un-American”
Shieh also criticized the broader system of elite academia:
“Of course they’re going to have to throw something at me after I exposed the waste. This is unmeritocratic and un-American. If schools are supposed to reward merit, why are they playgrounds for the wealthy?”
Since launching Bloat@Brown, Shieh has expanded the project to include similar trackers for Columbia, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Earlier this week, he again appealed to his followers on X to defend his free speech rights.
FIRE Responds to Brown
In a formal letter to Brown officials, FIRE’s Dominic Coletti wrote:
“Brown’s own expressive promises bar it from punishing Shieh for his use of ‘Brown’ in registering 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 a request for comment.
This piece was brought to you by Toni Airaksinen, Senior Editor of Liberty Affair and an independent journalist based in Boca Raton, Florida. Follow her on X @Toni_Airaksinen, and on Instagram.
