Last week, Alex Shieh, a student in Brown University’s class of 2027, testified before Congress. The hearing was focused on antitrust violations in higher education and surging tuition prices.
Shieh’s testimony came just weeks after Brown University opened an investigation into him for creating a website that scrutinized how the $93,064-a-year institution allocates its funds.
Shieh, inspired by Elon Musk, launched the DOGE-style project in March. Working from the basement of his dormitory — a “room that floods whenever it rains and thus has plastic tarps, industrial fans, and wet floor signs permanently set up” — he discovered a “small army” of administrative staff who work at the Ivy League school.
Using AI, he compiled a comprehensive list of university positions, then ranked them by operational importance with a custom-built program. He published the results on a site called Bloat@Brown — but Shieh didn’t stop there. Identifying himself as a journalist, he emailed staff members asking them to describe their roles, detail recent tasks, and explain how students would be affected if their positions didn’t exist.
Shieh’s project was no doubt cheeky. Anyone who has seen Mike Judge’s movie Office Space knows employees don’t like having to justify their jobs. (Who can forget the Bobs?) And its results were predictable. Only twenty or so employees responded, two of whom told Shieh he could perform a sexual act on himself (one suggested he use “an entire cactus”).
Less predictable was Brown University’s response.
First, Brown sent out a memo to employees instructing them not to respond. Then, according to The New York Times, officials informed Shieh “he was under investigation for possible violations of the university’s code of student conduct, including its prohibitions on invasion of privacy, misrepresentation, and emotional or psychological harm.”
Though Shieh and his associates were eventually cleared of wrongdoing, the episode is yet another demonstration of the intellectual and bureaucratic rot that afflicts America’s elite universities. As Joshua Pederson, a professor of humanities at Boston University, wrote in Slate, the intent of Brown was clear: “They came to bury Shieh, not to praise him.”
The university took this action even though Shieh was highlighting a genuine problem. Pederson cites a report by Paul Weinstein Jr. of the Progressive Policy Institute, which documents a dramatic rise in non-faculty hiring at the top 50 US colleges. There is now one administrative employee for every four students.
“The results of this research underscore that non-faculty employees at universities, both public and private, have grown considerably and without necessary oversight, under college presidents and their boards,” Weinstein wrote. “While some of this growth may have been necessary, there is no doubt that much of it has not.”
The problem is particularly acute at Brown, where the non-faculty employee-student ratio reportedly is 1 to 3.
Officials at Brown may not like their hiring decisions being questioned by a mere undergrad, but it’s not outside the boundaries of academic inquiry. Indeed, Pederson says Shieh deserves applause for launching a project that is quite impressive for an undergrad.
“If I’d had the opportunity to work with Mr. Shieh, I would have begun by praising him for identifying and focusing on a pressing problem for American higher education in a time of rising tuition costs: administrative bloat,” writes Pederson, adding that he doesn’t necessarily agree with Shieh.
Brown, unfortunately, chose another route, opting to launch a clumsy investigation into the rising junior. In doing so, the university elevated Shieh’s research, highlighting the administrative bloat that is putting college out of reach of many students and leaving countless others saddled with immense debt.
The surging cost of higher education stems from various factors, but Shieh’s project homed in on one of them.
“I discovered that much of the money is being thrown into a pit of bureaucracy,” Shieh wrote at Pirates Wire.
Shieh — as a student, journalist, and taxpayer — was well within his rights to investigate how Brown University spends his and others’ tuition dollars. But instead of defending his academic freedom, Brown University chose to launch a punitive investigation, going so far as to accuse Shieh of trademark infringement for using the word “Brown” in an article headline!
It’s hard to imagine a more self-defeating response. What began as a student research project became a full-blown PR disaster. Brown was publicly rebuked by The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression(FIRE), which stated that the university’s actions “clearly infringe on his expressive freedoms and further violate Brown’s robust guarantees to protect free expression consistent with First Amendment principles.” Shieh’s work has since attracted national attention, including his invitation to provide congressional testimony.
Like many elite universities, Brown receives hundreds of millions in federal funding each year despite its $7.2 billion endowment. Unfortunately, the university’s response is the latest evidence that US universities are broken, dysfunctional, and unworthy of public trust and support.