‘What do you do all day?’: Brown University investigates student who demanded 3,800 administrators answer the DOGE-inspired question

Sophomore Alex Shieh detailed the incident in an article for Pirate Wires, explaining that he created a public database mapping the university’s 3,805 non-faculty employees and sent each one an email asking, “What do you do all day?” The email follows similar practices done by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has sent requests to federal employees asking them to outline their job duties.

Shieh said he compiled the database using publicly available information, including job postings, the student newspaper, and LinkedIn profiles. He then used GPT-4o to rank administrators by operational importance. His investigation was driven by concerns over rising tuition costs, as fees have risen to over $93,000 this year and the school runs a $46 million annual budget deficit.

“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.”

He categorized certain positions as either diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) roles, redundant jobs, or what he called “bullsh*t jobs.”

“DEI was a concern because the Trump Administration warned it would stop funding schools with DEI programs. Those who were redundant (think multiple full-timers assigned to ad sales for the alumni magazine) simply bloated the bottom line,” he explained. “And ‘bullsh*t jobs,’ the least polite but most prescient category, drew inspiration from a book of the same title, by anthropologist David Graeber, that described useless but common jobs. In Brown’s case, that means, for example, executive assistants for ‘associate vice provosts,’ someone titled ‘Associate Director for Student Success and Senior Data Analyst,’ and a ‘Household Assistant’ tending to the University President.”

Shieh said he received only about 20 responses, including one that simply read, “f*ck you,” and another that told him to “stick an entire cactus up [his] a**.” Shortly after he sent the emails, Brown employees received a memo ordering them not to respond, according to Shieh.

He also claimed that someone leaked his Social Security number, his website was hacked from a Brown University IP address, and his inbox was flooded with pornographic spam. Within 48 hours, he was informed that he was under review for “emotional/psychological harm,” “misrepresentation,” “invasion of privacy,” and “violation of operational rules.” An associate dean, whom Shieh’s model flagged as redundant, ordered him to return any confidential information he had collected, though he pointed out that his data came from public sources.

“These bizarre Kafkaesque proceedings are still ongoing, but I have the full-throated support of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), a free speech watchdog group,” Sheih said in response to the blowback he received.

“The administration probably figured they could bully me into backing down. But it won’t be that easy,” he wrote. “As I see it, America is supposed to be a meritocracy, and the Ivy League an economic ladder for bright kids from poor families. But Brown is greasing the rungs. With sky-high tuition and famously stingy financial aid — not to mention an antitrust settlement for allegedly colluding with other Ivies to lowball on financial aid offers — the American Dream is being paywalled.”