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Alex Shieh says he’s fighting for universities to be ‘filled with the best and the brightest, not the richest and most well connected’ 

“Elite academia is in crisis,” says the student journalist who found himself the central figure in a First Amendment controversy at Brown University.

Alex Shieh, a sophomore, recently made headlines for his investigation into administrative bloat that landed him in hot water with Brown administrators.

“Ivy League schools used to be seen as incubators of brilliant minds, and as such, served as an economic ladder for bright kids from poor families. However, that American Dream is growing increasingly out of reach,” he told The College Fix in a recent interview.

Shieh sent every administrator at Brown an email earlier this spring, asking for details about their jobs and directing them to the website Bloat@Brown, a project of the resurrected conservative student newspaper the Brown Spectator. Shieh’s investigation organized administrative jobs into three different categories: “legality,” “redundancy,” and “bullshit jobs.”

Shieh’s self-proclaimed goal was to make Brown “affordable again,” but the university quickly levied a variety of charges against him, arguing the “derogatory” terms he used may have “emotionally harmed” employees. He also was accused of “improperly us[ing] data accessed through a University technology platform.”

While the university dropped the case against Shieh earlier this month, he believes the situation is very telling regarding the state of higher education today.

“The increase in the cost of education has trended with the increase in the number of administrators — 3,805 at Brown, which has an undergraduate population of only 7,200…” he told The Fix via email.

“I was seeking to better understand each one’s role, to identify who was necessary, and who constituted the bloat, so that Brown could become…affordable again,” Shieh (pictured) said.

In his report, he found that the university employs “roughly one administrator for every two undergrads, meaning that every student personally foots the bill for half of an administrator’s salary.”

“Despite budget shortfalls that leave dorms flooding when it rains, Brown currently boasts 3,805 non-instructional full-time staff members on payroll — a staggering number considering Brown currently has 7,229 undergraduate students,” he wrote at Bloat@Brown.

Additionally, the “non-instructional staff count also dwarfs the 1,691 members of the faculty, with Brown employing more than two administrators for every faculty member on payroll,” according to his investigation.

Sharing his thoughts about the charges that Brown levied against him, he told The Fix, “I knew from the beginning it was pure retaliation.”

“Associate Dean Kirsten Wolfe, on behalf of the school, threw the entire rule book at me, first trying to discipline me for causing ‘emotional/psychological harm,’ ‘invasion of privacy,’ and ‘misrepresentation’ before settling on violations of the IT policy and trademark policy to formally charge me with,” he told The Fix.

Initially, the university contended that Shieh misrepresented himself as a journalist because the Brown Spectator is not a recognized “active” student organization, The Fix previously reported. However, it later dropped that claim.

Shieh continued, “While Brown will insist they were trying to discipline me over non-speech related issues, like trademarks and technology violations, it is clear that they began an investigation of these flimsy charges, which not even Brown’s reviewers could find me guilty of, BECAUSE they disagreed with my speech and felt the need to punish me for it, even if indirectly.”

The College Fix also reached out to Brian Clark, a spokesperson for Brown, to hear the university’s perspective on the case.

“Since the start of this matter, Brown has proceeded in complete accordance with free expression guarantees and appropriate procedural safeguards under University policies and applicable law,” Clark told The Fix via email.

“Despite continued public reporting framing this as a free speech issue, it absolutely is not,” he said.

“Since the initiation of Brown’s review, that review has centered on investigating whether improper use of non-public Brown data or non-public data systems violated law or policy; whether deliberate targeting of individual employees violated law or policy; and whether violations to Brown’s misrepresentation or name use policies took place,” Clark said.

However, Dominic Coletti, a program officer for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, disagreed.

“I believe Brown didn’t like Shieh’s journalism, plain and simple. The university never committed to a single theory of what exactly Shieh did wrong, and it found him Not Responsible on all counts. The changing story and lack of evidence belie Brown’s retaliatory animus,” Coletti said.

“Student journalists should be free to report even controversial and unflattering things about their institutions without fear of repercussions,” he told The Fix.

Shieh, when asked how his classmates responded to the controversy, said some understood his concerns but most did not.

“Around half seemed to be understanding of the idea that Brown is too expensive and the administrative bloat is part of the reason why,” Shieh said. “But a large number seemed scornful, suggesting that if $93,000 is too expensive, one should simply enroll elsewhere, such as a community college perhaps.”

“I find such sentiment a sign of the elitism at places like Brown where the implication is if $93,000 is too expensive for you, you don’t belong here,” he said.

“Elite academia is in crisis because of a refusal to accommodate ordinary Americans and an unaccountable class of bureaucrats who treat universities as corporate brands rather than institutions of learning,” Shieh told The Fix.

“Today elite schools are elitist. I’m fighting for them to be elite in a meritocratic sense, where they are filled with the best and the brightest, not the richest and most well connected,” he said.

MORE: Brown U. student journalist started looking into administrative bloat. Now he’s being investigated.

IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: A gate opens to Brown University; Anthony Ricci/Shutterstock

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