Brown University student causes ‘harm’ for sending DOGE-like email to staff

A student at Brown University is being accused by the university of causing “emotional harm” because he asked the school’s non-faculty employees what they do all day. 

“It costs $93,064 to attend Brown University,” student Alex Shieh wrote in an op-ed in Pirate Wires published Tuesday. “The annual budget deficit is $46 million. I wanted to know where the hell all the money was going.”

With the help of AI, Shieh created a database of the 3,805 non-faculty employees of Brown University. He also emailed them asking them, “What do you do all day?” 

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To organize his information and rank the roles of the non-faculty employees, he created a website, Bloat@Brown, which Shieh said was similar to DOGE and Mark Zuckerberg’s college project of scrapping student ID photos to rank who was hotter.

Shieh wrote about how he used publicly available information on LinkedIn, the student newspaper, and job boards to compile all the information he could about each employee and fed that information into a GPT-4o mini, an AI app, to rank the non-faculty employees. 

Shieh, a sophomore at Brown University, said he did this work from a common room in his dorm’s basement that floods whenever it rains, thus making plastic tarps for the shared work and leisure space a necessity for a school that charges students $93,064 a year.

He formatted his site to identify three particular jobs: “DEI jobs, redundant jobs, and bulls–t jobs.” 

According to Shieh, DEI was important to look into because of President Donald Trump’s executive orders and his administration threatening to withhold federal funds to universities with DEI policies. 

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In fiscal year 2024, Brown University, which has an Office of Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion, reportedly received “more than $254 million” in federal funding. 

“After doing some digging, I discovered that much of the money is being thrown into a pit of bureaucracy,” Shieh wrote. “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.”

In addition to the information Shieh found, he also sent a mass email to the 3,805 non-faculty employees asking about their duties. 

“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 said, adding that he said he was a journalist for The Brown Spectator, an inactive libertarian journal that is attempting to restart. 

Shieh said that only 20 of the 3,805 people emailed responded, with some replies allegedly saying, “f–k you,” and another directing Shieh to “stick an entire cactus up [his] a–.”

The following day, after sending the email, the university reportedly told staff not to respond to Shieh’s email. In addition, Shieh claimed his social security number was leaked, and his email was spammed with “every porn newsletter on the internet.”

“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, who is being represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), said the associate dean also told him give back all the confidential information he had, which he says was “scraped from the public internet.” 

“If college administrators are this scared of a sophomore with a laptop, they should be terrified of what’s coming next,” Shieh wrote. 

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In a statement to Fox News Digital, Brian Clark, vice president for news and strategic campus communications at Brown University said, “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 added that “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. 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. 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.”