Brown University student investigated after sending staff ‘DOGE’-esque emails

• Brown University sophomore Alex Shieh published a database of 3,805 non-faculty employees and emailed them, asking them to justify their roles. Now, he is being investigated for causing “emotional distress” and other alleged violations.

• Shieh’s actions, inspired by Elon Musk’s approach to assessing employee importance, spurred the university to investigate.

• The Trump administration recently deported a Brown professor over alleged ties to Hamas, adding further scrutiny to the university’s handling of political and administrative matters.

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A student journalist at Brown University compiled a list of non-instructional staff and emailed each one to ask them to justify their positions, apparently inspired by Elon Musk’s method of gauging employee importance in an organization or government agency. Now, he’s under investigation for causing “emotional distress” to several university employees.

Brown sophomore Alex Shieh, who also writes conservative opinion columns for the Boston Globe, built and published a database of 3,805 non-faculty employees at the university. He used artificial intelligence to classify them by importance using publicly available information. According to an entry published by Pirate Wires, he flagged any jobs that involved diversity, equity and inclusion. 

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

He said his reasoning for the database was the school’s $46 million annual budget deficit, despite what he said is a cost of more than $93,000 in annual tuition and fees to attend the Ivy League university.

‘DOGE’ email

Shieh emailed university employees on March 18, asking them to describe their previous week’s tasks, according to a post from X. The request resembles emails sent out by the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to federal employees qualifying them as candidates for layoffs. 

Shieh said that he received notification two days later that the school was investigating him for “‘emotional/psychological harm,” “misrepresentation,” “invasion of privacy” and “violation of operational rules.”

Response

A Brown University spokesperson told Pirate Wires that Shieh improperly used a university database to publish “derogatory descriptions of job functions of named individuals at every job level.” He said that the database contained inaccuracies and mischaracterizations, but the school couldn’t refute them due to student privacy laws. 

Brown’s code of conduct policy allows students to express political views and “petition the authorities, the public and the University.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) defended Shieh on March 27. 

“Telling someone they are the target of an investigation can have a chilling effect on speech, especially in cases like this one, where universities also can’t use chilling investigations as fishing expeditions,” Dominic Colletti, a member of FIRE’s campus advocacy team, wrote. “Brown’s effort to get Shieh himself to substantiate its assertions against him by providing evidence he thinks could relate to the allegations against him flips the disciplinary process on its head.”​

The university has already gotten the attention of the Trump administration. A Brown professor, Dr. Rasha Alawieh, was detained on March 13 by federal law enforcement officials. According to CBS, she was deported after she told Customs and Border Protection that she had attended the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, a Hezbollah leader, in Beirut.

While the Department of Homeland Security said it revoked Alawieh’s visa for “glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans,” the professor said that she follows Nasrallah as a religious figure in the Shia Muslim community.