Ivy League school puts student journalist on notice for adm ‘bloat’ review
Hack and DOGE? Brown University allegedly told Alex Shieh, of the soon-to-relaunch Brown Spectator, to keep the investigation a secret. Someone sent Shieh his SSN, a perceived doxing threat, after he asked administrators what they do.
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U.S. Institute of Peace employees were so alarmed by the Department of Government Efficiency entering their gleaming building, a stone’s throw from the Potomac River, they allegedly sabotaged locks and communications infrastructure.
Brown University had a more bureaucratic response to the student journalist behind a DOGE-like review of its alleged 3,805 administrators, threatening sanctions against him, while an employee may have also gone rogue against him.
The Ivy League school launched a “preliminary review” of whether Alex Shieh, already familiar to TV news bookers for his criticism of racial preferences and disruptive activism in higher education, violated of its student code through the “Bloat@Brown” project for the Brown Spectator, a defunct conservative-libertarian newspaper that is set to relaunch.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression is “in touch” with Shieh “and monitoring the situation,” but not formally “representing Alex at the moment,” student press program officer Dominic Coletti told Just the News.
He shared the March 20 letter Shieh received from the Office of Student Conduct & Community Standards, email correspondence between Associate Dean Kirsten Wolfe and Shieh, and an oral conversation between Shieh and Wolfe that the student relayed to Coletti.
“Brown laudably promises its students free expression and due process,” Coletti wrote on X. “Now, faced with expression the university doesn’t like, it has launched a chilling investigation without offering evidence of rulebreaking.”
The review may violate Rhode Island law, Shieh told Just the News, referring to the Student Journalists’ Freedom of Expression Act signed into law in 2017 by former Gov. Gina Raimondo, who was later President Biden’s Commerce secretary.
It protects student journalists at public and private schools, whether their work is sponsored by the school or not, and while it exempts expression that constitutes an “unwarranted invasion of privacy,” it does not allow crackdowns based on “undifferentiated fear or apprehension.”
Here you go Steve. pic.twitter.com/qEIzbmjUqZ
— Alex Shieh (@alexkshieh) March 18, 2025
Hack from inside the house
Bloat@Brown told visitors that someone using the university’s computer network hacked the website after Shieh asked administrators to explain their jobs in light of its total cost of attendance ($93,064) for next year – a 4.85% rise – as well as $46 million structural deficit and “illegal” diversity, equity and inclusion programs that are “jeopardizing federal funding.”
“The cyberattack from the Brown network also temporarily disabled our public database of every administrator and its AI flagging system,” reads the website, referring to an artificial intelligence algorithm that “scrapes publicly available internet sources for each employee and role” and evaluates the jobs’ risk and value through a large language model.
Shieh told Just the News the hack corrupted the database so that some information was incorrect as well as making it difficult to display.
He warned Brown the day before the notice of preliminary review that the university risked losing federal funding if it kept policies rejected by the Trump administration, just as its Ivy League peer University of Pennsylvania lost $175 million, at least temporarily, for letting males compete against females in women’s sports.
“Meanwhile, Harvard just made tuition free for families earning under $200K,” Shieh wrote on X March 19. “But Brown? Drowning in waste, we just settled an anti-trust lawsuit over financial aid collusion” and administrators outnumber faculty more than two to one.
“Brown’s skyrocketing spending and legally questionable DEI programs raise serious concerns about whether tuition dollars are funding mission-critical functions” or just “desk jobs sitting in meetings and churning out memos of questionable value,” Shieh wrote on the project website.
They are neither instructors nor “food service workers, janitors, or security guards” but rather “a small army of mid-level administrators working out of sight, and in some cases completely remotely,” he wrote.
Shieh said Bloat@Brown is based on the “internal org chart” that maps out “which employees report to whom” at Brown.
The #SupremeCourt‘s decision in #SFFA v. #Harvard is a win for all Americans. Students will now be judged for who they are as individuals — without that judgment being clouded by racial stereotypes. Follow if you agree! pic.twitter.com/khhirQbbv7
— Alex Shieh (@alexkshieh) July 3, 2023
Doxing and self-incrimination
In the March 20 letter marked “personal and confidential,” Wolfe said Shieh allegedly “accessed a proprietary University data system which maintains confidential human resources, financial, and student information and used this information to produce a publicly available website, resulting in emotional distress for several University employees.”
He also allegedly “misrepresented” himself to staff and administrators as a reporter for “a student organization that is not currently recognized by the University,” Wolfe wrote.
The letter cites four sections of the student conduct code Shieh may have violated, through behavior that “can reasonably be expected to result in significant emotional or psychological harm,” violating “a reasonable expectation of privacy” as judged by the school’s Ocean State Clinical Coordinating Center, “providing false identification” of himself and “violation of operational rules.”
Wolfe ordered him to “return or provide evidence of deletion of any confidential information obtained from any proprietary University data system” and warned his “access to University data systems may also be restricted.”
Days later she ordered Shieh to incriminate himself in violation of Brown’s own policy, by providing evidence that he deleted unidentified and supposedly confidential data, or he may be charged with “failure to comply.” Wolfe allegedly told him in person to not disclose the investigation.
Brown is not only violating its press freedom promises to students but undermining President Christina Paxson’s March 20 statement that it will “always defend” freedom of expression “for individual members of our community,” FIRE’s Coletti wrote Thursday.
“Certainly, administrators are within their rights to investigate actual breaches of confidentiality policies,” he said. “But investigating journalism, offbeat though it may be, is a far cry from that.”
Shieh declined to discuss his meeting with Wolfe or the disciplinary process with Just the News, the same response he gave The Chronicle of Higher Education, but said the Brown Spectator is relaunching “this semester,” the Bloat@Brown project differs from DOGE in that “we’re not HR,” and that it assumes “some degree of bloat” but requires more data to confirm how much.
Hey @ElonMusk, @VivekGRamaswamy, is this how it’s done?
I emailed all 3,805 @BrownUniversity administrators to ask: What did you do last week?
Brown charges students $93,064/year, runs a $46M deficit, and could face federal funding cuts over DEI & antisemitism. One employee,… pic.twitter.com/tykBeZjHjZ
— Alex Shieh (@alexkshieh) March 18, 2025
He asked administrators how students “would be impacted if your position was eliminated” and to describe, like DOGE, “what tasks you performed in the past week.” Shieh also showed each recipient their listing in Bloat@Brown, asked for comment on their “current rating” and called himself a reporter who wanted to hear “your side.”
He questioned to The Chronicle whether “some mid-level associate provost of something something [sic] really needs multiple executive assistants.”
The core motive for the project was Harvard’s free tuition announcement in contrast to Brown’s financial woes and its ballooning tuition, Shieh said. He pointed Just the News to a New York Times review of “economic diversity and student outcomes” in the Ivy League, which found Brown’s students had the highest median family income among the class of 2013.
Rather than its new “temporary” hiring freeze, Brown should have looked at “people currently employed who[se roles] should be vacant,” he said.
Brown spokesperson Brian Clark told The Chronicle the university “advised staff not to respond” and that it was “evaluating the situation and the use of data about Brown employees from a policy standpoint,” which “will inform our next steps.”
About 20 people responded to Shieh, with some giving good-faith answers while one told him to “F— off” and others apparently signed him up for junk email lists, including from a website that lets users email a crude drawing.
What concerns Shieh the most is someone anonymously sending him his social security number, which only the Brown registrar’s office should have, he told Just the News.
FIRE’s Coletti told Just the News it doesn’t think the staff responses to the email are retaliatory, though “we have not examined whether their expression is protected by Brown’s free speech guarantees.” (Academic freedom generally does not apply to administrative speech.)
Brown’s Clark responded on Friday morning to Just the News queries sent Tuesday through Thursday on possible chilling effects of its investigation and retaliation against Shieh by staff, whether it’s investigating the hack from Brown’s network on Bloat@Brown, what “proprietary” system Shieh allegedly breached, and why Brown must recognize the Spectator for Shieh to accurately identify himself as a reporter.
“In the early morning hours of Tuesday, March 18, emails were sent to approximately 3,800 Brown staff members noting the launch of a website that appeared to improperly use data accessed through a University technology platform to target individual employees by name and position description,” Clark’s email says.
“The website included derogatory descriptions of job functions of named individuals at every job level. While the emails were framed as a journalistic inquiry, 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,” he said.
“We advised employees, many of whom expressed concerns, not to respond, and evaluated the situation from a policy standpoint. That review has informed the steps we’ve taken since,” according to Clark. “Due to federal law protecting student privacy, the University cannot provide additional details, even to refute the inaccuracies and mischaracterizations that have been made public. We are treating this matter with the utmost seriousness.”
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(TLB) published this report with permission of John Solomon at Just the News. Click Here to read about the staff at Just the News
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