Final week, Alex Shieh, a scholar in Brown College’s class of 2027, testified earlier than Congress. The listening to was centered on antitrust violations in increased schooling and surging tuition costs.
Shieh’s testimony got here simply weeks after Brown College opened an investigation into him for creating a web site that scrutinized how the $93,064-a-year establishment allocates its funds.
Shieh, impressed by Elon Musk, launched the DOGE-style mission in March. Working from the basement of his dormitory — a “room that floods every time it rains and thus has plastic tarps, industrial followers, and moist ground indicators completely arrange” — he found a “small military” of administrative workers who work on the Ivy League college.
Utilizing AI, he compiled a complete listing of college positions, then ranked them by operational significance with a custom-built program. He printed the outcomes on a website referred to as Bloat@Brown — however Shieh didn’t cease there. Figuring out himself as a journalist, he emailed workers members asking them to explain their roles, element current duties, and clarify how college students could be affected if their positions didn’t exist.
Shieh’s mission was little doubt cheeky. Anybody who has seen Mike Decide’s film Workplace Area is aware of staff don’t like having to justify their jobs. (Who can neglect the Bobs?) And its outcomes have been predictable. Solely twenty or so staff responded, two of whom informed Shieh he might carry out a sexual act on himself (one instructed he use “a whole cactus”).
Much less predictable was Brown College’s response.
First, Brown despatched out a memo to staff instructing them to not reply. Then, in line with The New York Instances, officers knowledgeable Shieh “he was below investigation for attainable violations of the college’s code of scholar conduct, together with its prohibitions on invasion of privateness, misrepresentation, and emotional or psychological hurt.”
Although Shieh and his associates have been finally cleared of wrongdoing, the episode is yet one more demonstration of the mental and bureaucratic rot that afflicts America’s elite universities. As Joshua Pederson, a professor of humanities at Boston College, wrote in Slate, the intent of Brown was clear: “They got here to bury Shieh, to not reward him.”
The college took this motion despite the fact that Shieh was highlighting a real drawback. Pederson cites a report by Paul Weinstein Jr. of the Progressive Coverage Institute, which paperwork a dramatic rise in non-faculty hiring on the prime 50 US faculties. There’s now one administrative worker for each 4 college students.
“The outcomes of this analysis underscore that non-faculty staff at universities, each private and non-private, have grown significantly and with out mandatory oversight, below faculty presidents and their boards,” Weinstein wrote. “Whereas a few of this development might have been mandatory, there isn’t any doubt that a lot of it has not.”
The issue is especially acute at Brown, the place the non-faculty employee-student ratio reportedly is 1 to three.
Officers at Brown might not like their hiring choices being questioned by a mere undergrad, but it surely’s not exterior the boundaries of educational inquiry. Certainly, Pederson says Shieh deserves applause for launching a mission that’s fairly spectacular for an undergrad.
“If I’d had the chance to work with Mr. Shieh, I’d have begun by praising him for figuring out and specializing in a urgent drawback for American increased schooling in a time of rising tuition prices: administrative bloat,” writes Pederson, including that he doesn’t essentially agree with Shieh.
Brown, sadly, selected one other route, opting to launch a slipshod investigation into the rising junior. In doing so, the college elevated Shieh’s analysis, highlighting the executive bloat that’s placing faculty out of attain of many college students and leaving numerous others saddled with immense debt.
The surging price of upper schooling stems from varied components, however Shieh’s mission homed in on certainly one of them.
“I found that a lot of the cash is being thrown right into a pit of forms,” Shieh wrote at Pirates Wire.
Shieh — as a scholar, journalist, and taxpayer — was nicely inside his rights to analyze how Brown College spends his and others’ tuition {dollars}. However as a substitute of defending his educational freedom, Brown College selected to launch a punitive investigation, going as far as to accuse Shieh of trademark infringement for utilizing the phrase “Brown” in an article headline!
It’s onerous to think about a extra self-defeating response. What started as a scholar analysis mission grew to become a full-blown PR catastrophe. Brown was publicly rebuked by The Basis for Particular person Rights and Expression(FIRE), which acknowledged that the college’s actions “clearly infringe on his expressive freedoms and additional violate Brown’s strong ensures to guard free expression per First Modification rules.” Shieh’s work has since attracted nationwide consideration, together with his invitation to offer congressional testimony.
Like many elite universities, Brown receives tons of of thousands and thousands in federal funding every year regardless of its $7.2 billion endowment. Sadly, the college’s response is the newest proof that US universities are damaged, dysfunctional, and unworthy of public belief and assist.
