Brown University has filed disciplinary charges against a student journalist who sent a Department of Government Efficiency-inspired email asking administrators to explain what they do all day.
Mimicking an email that Elon Musk’s DOGE sent to federal workers, sophomore Alex Shieh asked 3,805 administrators at the Ivy League campus in a March 18 email to “describe what tasks you performed in the past week.”
In a phone call Wednesday, Mr. Shieh said the Ivy League university has summoned him to answer charges of misrepresenting himself as a reporter for the Brown Spectator, an unrecognized conservative student publication.
He said Brown has also accused him of violating operational rules by publishing the names and positions of staff members on the Spectator’s website.
“The disciplinary charges are retaliatory,” Mr. Shieh, a 20-year-old computer science and economics major, told The Washington Times. “I think they’re trying to silence criticism.”
Mr. Shieh said he plans to defend himself at the meeting, which has not yet been scheduled. The process could result in the Rhode Island campus placing him on probation, a formal reprimand that he said could hinder his participation in campus activities.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a Philadelphia free-speech group tracking Mr. Shieh’s situation, urged Brown President Christina H. Paxton in a letter Wednesday to drop the investigation.
“While Shieh’s reporting may have annoyed some Brown employees, it is protected by the university’s strong and laudable free expression promises and cannot be the subject of an investigation,” wrote Dominic Coletti, a FIRE program officer. “Further, any investigation into alleged conduct not protected by Brown’s speech guarantees must still abide by the university’s due process commitments.”
Mr. Shieh, an Asian-American student from New Hampshire, said he would consider filing a lawsuit if the university places him on probation.
The Times has reached out to Brown for comment.
In a March 27 statement, university spokesman Brian Clark said Mr. Shieh’s email to administrators referenced the Brown Spectator’s online list of administrators, which he said appeared to “target individual employees by name and position description.”
“The website included derogatory descriptions of job functions of named individuals at every job level,” Mr. Clark said. “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.”
He said that while Brown advised employees not to respond and was treating the incident “with utmost seriousness,” federal law prevented him from providing more details.
According to a page on the Brown Spectator website, Mr. Shieh sent the March 18 email to learn why the elite school charges $93,046 a year in tuition but has a $46 million “structural budget deficit.”
The publication said “someone with a Brown IP address” used a cyberattack to temporarily close the website’s “Bloat@Brown” page listing the staff members.
As of this week, the page was back online. It identifies 49 administrators in “potentially illegal” diversity, equity and inclusion positions that it blamed for the Trump administration canceling $510 billion in federal grants to the school this month.
Mr. Shieh also received a March 20 letter from school officials threatening to restrict his access to university systems as they probed claims that he “emotionally harmed” employees and violated confidentiality policies by sharing the information.
As of Wednesday, he said the university had dropped the emotional harm claim from its charges against him.
“Rather than make decisions based on merit, elite schools are catering to the wealthy and virtue-signalling, creating a caste system that isn’t great for our country,” Mr. Shieh added. “My view of the current landscape is that higher education is not fair, not affordable for students and not accountable to the American people.”
