Brown University has opened an investigation into a student for sending emails to administrators asking them what they do in a day.
The 20-year-old sophomore at the university, Alex Shieh, sent emails to all 3,805 administrators at Brown asking them to “Describe what tasks you performed in the past week.” Now the school is investigating him for inflicting “Emotional/Psychological Harm” on the staff, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
School officials accuse Shieh of obtaining confidential information and are requiring him to send proof he has deleted the content, essentially requiring the student to incriminate himself, something that Brown’s policies are supposed to protect him from. Shieh denies he obtained any confidential information.
Brown University Investigates Student Journalist Alex Shieh Over Email | Ben Squires, Reclaim The Net
A mass email meant to provoke reflection on administrative accountability has turned into a campus standoff over the limits of student speech.
A Brown University student… pic.twitter.com/iRsrgM5aLO
— Owen Gregorian (@OwenGregorian) March 31, 2025
Brown quickly attempted to silence Shieh. The student says the site he created to log the information that he captured in his investigation, titled Bloat@Brown, was hacked by someone with a university IP address not long after he sent the emails to administrators. Shieh also received an anonymous email threatening him with his own Social Security number.
“I expected some level of engagement, but only 20 people got back, one of whom only replied with a ‘fuck you,’ and another of whom suggested I ‘stick an entire cactus up [my] ass,’” Shieh wrote in Pirate Wires. “Immediately after the business day started, Brown sent a memo to employees ordering them not to respond. Someone leaked my Social Security number (only those in the registrar’s office should have access to it); someone else from a Brown IP address hacked the site; and there was a coordinated effort to flood my inbox with every porn newsletter on the internet.”
Shieh was attempting to uncover not only redundant or unnecessary jobs, but any diversity, equity and inclusion positions that would now be in violation of federal directives.
“The motivation is that Brown — and ivy leagues in general — the price is going through the roof,” Shieh told the DCNF. Brown charges students $93,064 per year in tuition alone, making it the second-most expensive in the nation.
The university also raked in approximately $254 million in federal funding in 2024 alone and has pushed for courts to block the Trump administration from cutting indirect research funds from universities.
“I’m trying to help Brown, to sort of expose these things so that they can remove them themselves and be compliant and raise awareness to that,” Shieh told the DCNF. “It’s certainly not my goal to have Brown lose its federal funding. I would like it to be compliant and keep its federal funding and also just to remove all these other administrative positions that might not be legally questionable, per se, but are just not necessary and also are bloating the bottom line.”
Brown is already on the federal government’s radar, with the Department of Education currently investigating the school for alleged noncompliance with civil rights laws and allegedly failing to protect Jewish students from discrimination.
In a letter sent to Shieh notifying him of the investigation, Brown also accuses the student of “Invasion of Privacy” and “Violation of Operational Rules” for sending the email. The school also said he misrepresented himself as a reporter for the Brown Spectator, a libertarian paper that the school no longer recognizes.
“It seems like retaliation that I investigated the bureaucracy, and they decided to investigate me back,” Shieh said. “I think it seems retaliatory because it might be beneficial for students if we lower the cost of education, but it’s an existential threat to this whole entire administrative class. And so, in that sense, I guess it makes sense that they’re freaking out about this.”
A Brown representative confirmed the investigation to the DCNF but declined to give additional information.
“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. The website included derogatory descriptions of job functions of named individuals at every job level,” a Brown spokesman told the DCNF. “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.”
The “derogatory descriptions” presumably refer to Shieh describing what he said were unnecessary and redundant positions as “bullshit jobs.”
“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,” the university spokesman said. “We are treating this matter with the utmost seriousness.”
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