A Brown University sophomore who created a database ranking the roles of over 3,800 non-faculty employees is facing disciplinary action for allegedly causing “emotional harm” through his investigation into university spending.
Alex Shieh, frustrated by Brown’s $46 million annual budget deficit despite its $93,064 annual tuition, created what he called “Bloat@Brown,” a website cataloging and categorizing the university’s administrative workforce.
“After doing some digging, I discovered that much of the money is being thrown into a pit of bureaucracy,” Shieh wrote in an op-ed published on Tuesday.
“The small army of 3,805 non-faculty administrators is more than double the faculty headcount, and makes for roughly one administrator for every two undergrads.”
Using publicly available information from LinkedIn, student newspapers and job boards, Shieh compiled employee data and utilized GPT-4o mini to analyze and categorize staff roles.
His website specifically identified what he termed “DEI jobs, redundant jobs, and bulls–t jobs.”
The project was conducted from what Shieh described as a common room in his dorm’s basement that “floods whenever it rains,” necessitating plastic tarps for a shared work space at an institution charging nearly $100,000 annually.
The investigation was particularly timely, Shieh noted, because President Donald Trump’s administration has threatened to withhold federal funding from universities with DEI policies.
Brown University, which maintains an Office of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI), reportedly received “more than $254 million” in federal funding during fiscal year 2024.
Shieh’s project took a controversial turn when he mass-emailed all 3,805 non-faculty employees with a straightforward question: “What do you do all day?”
He sent the emails “in the dead of night,” identifying himself as a journalist for The Brown Spectator, which he described as an inactive libertarian journal attempting to restart.
“This was purposefully done in the dead of night, just in case Brown’s IT team felt inclined to block emails from my domain,” Shieh explained in his account of the events.
Shieh shared in his op-ed for Pirate Wires that only 20 employees responded, with some replies allegedly containing profanity and personal attacks. The day after sending the email, the university reportedly instructed staff not to respond to Shieh’s inquiry.
Shieh also claimed his social security number was leaked, and his email was spammed with “every p*rn newsletter on the internet,” though he did not directly attribute these actions to any particular source.
The situation escalated quickly. “Less than 48 hours later, as has previously been reported, an associate dean my model warned could be redundant (her role overlapped with other deans on the discipline team and she was the only one without a JD) informed me I was under review for ’emotional/psychological harm,’ ‘misrepresentation,’ ‘invasion of privacy,’ and ‘violation of operational rules,'” Shieh wrote.
Shieh, now represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), claims the associate dean demanded he return all confidential information, which he maintains was “scraped from the public internet.”
His project has drawn comparisons to early versions of Facebook and other college projects that aggregated publicly available information. “If college administrators are this scared of a sophomore with a laptop, they should be terrified of what’s coming next,” Shieh concluded in his op-ed.
Brown University has responded to the situation. Brian Clark, vice president for news and strategic campus communications, confirmed in a statement to Fox News Digital that emails were sent to approximately 3,800 staff members on March 18, launching a website that “appeared to improperly use data accessed through a University technology platform to target individual employees by name and position description.”
Clark added that “The website included derogatory descriptions of job functions of named individuals at every job level.” While acknowledging the emails were framed as a journalistic inquiry, he noted that “the supposed news organization identified in the email has had no active status at Brown for more than a decade, and no news article resulted.”
The university advised employees not to respond and evaluated the situation from a policy standpoint. Clark cited federal law protecting student privacy as preventing the university from providing additional details or refuting what he called “inaccuracies and mischaracterizations.”
