Brown University Targets Student Journalist for Emailing Administrators
Brown is violating its code of conduct, which guarantees community members’ right to petition the university.
Alex Shieh, a student reporter for The Brown Spectator, is being investigated by Brown University. His alleged crime? Asking administrators about their jobs. On March 18, Shieh emailed each of Brown's 3,805 non-instructional full-time staff members, asking them to describe the tasks they performed in the past week. The university began its investigation two days later.
With Brown running on a $46 million deficit and annual tuition and fees set to increase to a combined $93,064 this July, Shieh launched the site Bloat@Brown (which is hosted by The Brown Spectator) on March 18. Inspired by the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Shieh strives to determine "whether tuition dollars are funding mission-critical functions" and "to expose the bureaucracy to which all 3,805 administrators belong." He would assign each administrator a rating of "low risk," "ambiguous," or "suspect" based on publicly available data used to determine "legality," "redundancy," and "bullshit job" subscores. The full methodology may be accessed here.
Kirsten Wolfe, Brown University associate dean and associate director of student conduct and community standards, notified Shieh that a preliminary investigation had been launched into his activities associated with Bloat@Brown two days following its publication. The notice was shared with Reason by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which is advocating for Shieh. Wolfe accuses Shieh of "accessing a proprietary University data system," causing "emotional distress for several University employees," and misrepresenting himself "as a reporter for the Brown Spectator," in the notice. These alleged behaviors violate the university code of conduct's prohibitions on emotional or psychological harm, invasion of privacy, misrepresentation, and violation of operational rules, according to Wolfe.
Wolfe also accuses Shieh of accessing a data system that contains "confidential human resources, financial, and student information," but does not specify the system she's referring to. Bloat@Brown only published the names and positions of administrators (both publicly available via the staff directory) alongside a subjective valuation of their value to the college. The directory is provided "solely for the information of the Brown University community and those who have a specific interest in reaching a specific individual," according to its acceptable use policy. Shieh is a member of the Brown community and plainly stated his interest in contacting each administrator.
Dominic Coletti, a program officer at FIRE, says, "It's hard to imagine how…that information could be confidential if it's also public." Shieh did not even publish the email addresses—also publicly available—of the administrators and went so far as to censor the recipient of one email he shared on X.
Brown guarantees students the freedom "of political activity inside and outside the University," including "the right to petition the authorities, the public and the University," per its code of conduct.
Brown claims that Shieh misrepresented himself by identifying as a reporter for The Brown Spectator. But Shieh is a staff member of The Brown Spectator; he is its publisher and a reporter. While the publication is not officially recognized by the university, its staff has been working on its revival with The Fund for American Studies (TFAS) Student Journalism Association since the summer of 2024. Shieh tells Reason they are "just trying to figure [out] the printing situation" but "have a bunch of other articles ready to go." Ryan Wolfe (unrelated to Kirsten Wolfe), the director of the Center for Excellence in Journalism at TFAS, confirms this.
Bryan Clark, Brown's vice president for news and strategic campus communications, tells Reason that Bloat@Brown "appeared to improperly use data accessed through a University technology platform to target individual employees by name and position description" but could not provide additional details about the allegations against Shieh "due to federal law protecting student privacy." Kirsten Wolfe did not respond to Reason's request for comment.
Coletti says that the university "needs to actually provide the allegations—it can't use the threat of possible punishment down the line as a sword of Damocles to impose a chill on any student's ability to, one, do journalism and report on the university and, two, talk about the investigation itself."
Bloat@Brown's interactive map of administrators was disabled by hackers on the day the site launched. Shieh tells Reason that the hackers bragged about their exploits on Sidechat, an anonymous social media app that sorts users by college community, meaning that the hackers must have "brown.edu" emails. Shieh says he and the team at The Brown Spectator are working to get the information back up.
Universities are supposed to be bastions of free speech. Brown's code of conduct reflects this ideal by requiring the university to notify students of charges made against them, affording students the opportunity to review the evidence against them, and recognizing students' right against self-incrimination. By withholding whatever evidence it may have against Shieh while threatening him with an ill-defined preliminary investigation for publishing publicly available information in a critical manner, Brown's behavior belies its values.
