A student at Brown University is facing disciplinary charges for emailing thousands of non-faculty employees in a “Doge-like” email asking, “What do you do all day?”
Alex Shieh created a database of 3,805 administrative employees to attempt to understand why the Ivy League has become so expensive after the latest tuition hike brought annual costs for students up to $93,000.
Shieh’s email attempted to identify three particular jobs: “DEI jobs, redundant jobs, and bulls*** jobs,” but in the end, Shieh only received several dozen largely profane, belligerent responses from irate bureaucrats in addition to possible repercussions from Brown.
“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.
“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,” he added.
Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) sent a letter to Brown University Friday morning urging the school to “reconsider any disciplinary action” against the Brown sophomore, first reported by Fox News.
“Reports indicate that Mr. Shieh engaged in a journalistic act of contacting university administrative employees to inquire about their roles and responsibilities. This action, it appears, stemmed from his perspective as a student paying a substantial tuition fee and experiencing concerns regarding university facilities, leading him to question the allocation of administrative resources,” Nehls wrote.
“Penalizing a student for what appears to be an attempt to understand the university’s administrative structure raises serious questions about the institution’s commitment to open inquiry and the tolerance of dissenting viewpoints.”
The congressman demanded information on how Brown uses its $7.2 billion endowment, which boasts a 10% annual return, to reduce student costs.
Annual expenses to attend Brown for 2025-2026 are estimated at nearly $96,000, including tuition, fees, food, and housing. Nehls previously introduced legislation that would significantly increase excise taxes on larger colleges’ endowment funds from 1.4% to 21%.
Brown University spokesman Brian Clark denied free speech was the issue, writing in a statement to Fox News, “At the center of Brown’s review are questions focused on whether improper use of non-public Brown data systems and/or targeting of individual employees violated law or policy.”
The controversy emerges as Ivy League schools face scrutiny from the Trump administration over both tuition rates and anti-Semitism concerns.
Shieh’s concerns regarding inflated college bureaucracies are reflected in a larger trend amongst universities, as according to Forbes, “Between 1976 and 2018, full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164% and 452%, respectively,” and “the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the U.S. increased by only 92%, marginally outpacing student enrollment which grew by 78%.”
Shieh is planning to bring his campaign to other Ivy Leagues such as The University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Cornell University “to expose wasteful expenditures there” and release “an online tool to demand that schools cease and desist DEI.”
