Earlier this month, Brown University sophomore Alex Shieh lit the internet on fire after asking the school’s small army of non-instructional staff to justify their jobs, receiving coverage from Newsweek and Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. Today in Pirate Wires, he writes about the inspiration behind his project — and its aftermath.

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Around 2 a.m. on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, I launched a public database mapping all 3,805 non-faculty employees of Brown University and sent each one a simple email: What do you do all day?

Ostensibly, it was a journalistic inquiry. The site, which I named Bloat@Brown, was somewhere between FaceMash (Mark Zuckerberg’s college project that scraped student ID photos and let users rank who was hotter) and DOGE. But instead of using Zuckerberg’s ELO-style rankings — a numerical method originally developed for ranking chess players — my site, Bloat@Brown, used retrieval-augmented generation and a custom GPT-4o pipeline to rank administrators by their operational importance.

First, I scraped the internet — job boards, the student newspaper, LinkedIn — to gather whatever I could about each employee. I fed that data into GPT-4o mini to generate a rough utility ranking. The results weren’t definitive — there is only so much information on the public web — but they seemed directionally accurate. (Like obvious DEI jobs triggered a DEI filter, for instance.)

While my roommate slept, I worked from the common room in my dorm’s basement — the same room that floods whenever it rains and thus has plastic tarps, industrial fans, and wet floor signs permanently set up despite Brown’s tuition and fees rising to $93,064 a year. Brown’s financial woes also mean that the school runs a $46 million annual budget deficit while professors constantly complain they’re underpaid. So, where is our $93,064 a year actually going?

After doing some digging, I discovered that much of the money is being thrown into a pit of bureaucracy. 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. In the US, the cost of college tuition has far outpaced inflation because, for one, administrative staff count has drastically outpaced growth in the student population — a cause for concern since, in the 20th century, universities were affordable and ran fine with a fraction of today’s staffers.

There were three specific types of roles I instructed my model to flag: DEI jobs, redundant jobs, and bullshit 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. And “bullshit 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.

The model made its predictions, but to increase accuracy, I needed another source of data. So, I triggered a batch email to all 3,805 admins via a script hooked to a public contact dataset I’d compiled. This was purposefully done in the dead of night, just in case Brown’s IT team felt inclined to block emails from my domain. (I identified myself as a journalist for The Brown Spectator, a dormant libertarian journal that a group of students are planning to relaunch.)

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.” 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.

Worse yet, it turns out, when you investigate the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy investigates you back. Less than 48 hours later, as has previously been reported, an associate dean my model warned could be redundant (her role overlapped with other deans on the discipline team and she was the only one without a JD) informed me I was under review for “emotional/psychological harm,” “misrepresentation,” “invasion of privacy,” and “violation of operational rules.”

This associate dean also demanded I return all confidential information I had — as if names and job titles scraped from the public internet were somehow secret intel that I had improperly accessed. 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. Brown’s actions may also run afoul of a Rhode Island state law that protects student journalists at private universities.

The administration probably figured they could bully me into backing down. But it won’t be that easy. 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.

Bloat@Brown has since gone viral on social media and in the mainstream press because it strikes a chord with those who know charging $93,064 for a year of college is morally wrong. Now, students at other Ivy League schools are asking me if they can run their own versions.

This was just the opening salvo. If college administrators are this scared of a sophomore with a laptop, they should be terrified of what’s coming next.

— Alex Shieh

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In a statement to Pirate Wires, Brown communications VP Brian Clark confirmed that Brown had advised employees not to respond to Alex’s emails, and has since evaluated the situation from a policy standpoint. His full statement:

“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. 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. 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. We are treating this matter with the utmost seriousness.”