Brown University Student Relaunches Database Highlighting DEI and Administrative Bloat
“Shieh thought he was doing Brown a favor, then, when he published the database”
We covered this student’s story in a previous post, but much has happened to him since then. The school’s reaction to what he is doing has been unreal.
The Washington Free Beacon reports:
Defiant Brown U Student Relaunches Database Spotlighting School’s DEI Administrators as Trump Admin Slashes $510 Million in Funding
When Brown University sophomore Alex Shieh published an online database spotlighting administrative bloat at the Ivy League school, he became the subject of both a university investigation and a hacking effort that shut his site down. Now, he’s barreling ahead, having launched a revamped version of the site that corresponds with Brown’s recent loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds.
Shieh’s “Bloat@Brown” database went back online Friday morning, hours after the Trump administration froze $510 million in federal funding to Brown over its DEI policies and response to campus anti-Semitism. A new header reads, “Meet the DEI bureaucrats who lost Brown University $510 million in federal funds.” Visitors can scroll through to learn the names of “49 Brown University employees” flagged for “potentially holding illegal DEI roles.” Titles include “Associate Dean for Undergraduate Research and Inclusive Science” and “Associate Vice President for Institutional Equity, Accessibility and Compliance.”
Shieh has become the campus face of the funding freeze thanks to the database, which he launched two weeks ago as a way of exposing redundant, “bullshit,” and “legally questionable” administrative jobs at Brown. The school employs some 3,800 non-faculty staffers—more than one for every two undergraduate students—and reported a $42 million budget deficit in 2024. Brown expects that figure to grow to $46 million this year.
Shieh thought he was doing Brown a favor, then, when he published the database, which included a warning that the Trump administration had threatened to cut the school’s federal funding over the “continued use of DEI programs that potentially violate the Civil Rights Act.” A student journalist with the Brown Spectator—a conservative campus paper that Shieh is resurrecting after an 11-year hiatus—Shieh paired the website launch with a DOGE-style email he sent to all 3,805 non-faculty employees asking them what they do.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Doge should hire this guy immediately just for his moxy. He is wasting his time at Brown.
Datarepublican and Alex Shieh are announcing the first annual convention for right-wing hackers, to be held in the confessional booth at Saint Pennywort’s Chapel in Odin, Nebraska.
We should have hundreds of these guys. Thousands.
The massive increase in tuition costs over all levels of education are due to administrative bloat. Why does any school need nearly 4,000 administrators and staffers for 7,500 students?
I asked Oberlin’s president the same thing at an alumni mixer event about 15 years ago. College costs have been basically double the rise in costs of everything else. He hemmed and hawed about a number of things but it was all BS. The number one driver was the easy availability of college loan money. The weird thing about college students is that they look only at the immediates costs when evaluating a financial aid plan. They think that it only costs them $10K a year to go to Oberlin, when in fact they are assuming a $70K/yr debt as well. As has been pointed out,
Brave young man. And at Brown, the leftiest of the Ivy League!