Channeling DOGE, a Brown U. Student Asked Administrators: What Do You Do All Day?

Alex Shieh thought the ask was simple enough: In so many words, justify your job. Last week, the Brown University sophomore emailed the more than 3,500 administrators and staff members who work for his institution, requesting that they explain “how Brown students would be impacted if your position was eliminated.”

Shieh, a 20-year-old pursuing a joint major in computer science and economics, said in an interview that he was not “directly inspired” by DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency — an Elon Musk-led effort to massively shrink the federal bureaucracy. But he acknowledged there are “parallels” between his attempt to identify bloat and that of the richest man on Earth. For example, in February, civil servants across the government received an email telling them to summarize what they’d accomplished that week. Shieh asked Brown staffers to describe “what tasks you performed in the past week.”

He also included a link to the employee’s listing in a database he’d created called Bloat@Brown that assessed Brown employees via artificial intelligence, based on factors such as if their positions are related to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, or if they appeared to overlap with that of a colleague or could be automated. For example, if a staffer’s role seemed like it could be replaced by technology, that person was judged as “suspect” for “redundancy.” Shieh asked them to “comment on your current rating in our database.” He was a reporter working on a story about Brown’s administration, he explained in the email, and wanted “to hear your side.”

Shieh told The Chronicle he began thinking about administrative bloat when he read Andrew Yang’s 2018 book, The War on Normal People. Yang, a Brown alum and onetime contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, blames the rising cost of college on ballooning bureaucracy, noting that the ratio of professional staff members to students has risen significantly since the 1970s. (Experts debate the degree to which that has contributed to the problem and point out that colleges are now expected, and in some cases required by law, to perform more services than in the past.)

Shieh found Yang’s argument compelling, especially when he considered Brown’s current financial picture. The university has been grappling with a $46-million structural deficit and recently approved increasing undergraduate tuition and fees by 4.85 percent, bringing the total to $93,064, including room and board. (That hike would be accompanied by a “significant increase” to the financial-aid budget, the provost has said. Most students do not pay their college’s sticker price.) In light of that increase, it struck Shieh as particularly ludicrous that Brown has more than twice as many nonfaculty employees as it does professors. According to the university, as of the fall of 2023 there were 3,805 staff members and 1,691 faculty members at Brown.

He also sees the existence of “DEI administrators” as a threat to Brown’s bottom line, now that colleges could stand to lose millions in federal dollars if the Trump administration, which has taken aim at DEI efforts, chooses to target them. (Shieh, a third-generation Asian American, has previously spoken to The Chronicle and other news outlets about his opposition to race-conscious admissions policies, which the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ended in 2023.)

So he started working on Bloat@Brown. According to Shieh, he developed an algorithm that scraped online information about Brown’s employees from sources like LinkedIn, job postings, and news articles. That information was plugged into OpenAI’s GPT-4o mini model, which then assessed each employee based on three categories. In addition to “legality” and “redundancy,” there’s an even less polite criterion: “bullshit job.”

It’s based on Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, a provocative book written by the late anthropologist David Graeber. In it, Graeber argues that a huge amount of work completed today is essentially pointless. He classifies those positions into five categories: duct-tapers, box-tickers, taskmasters, goons, and flunkies. Though Graeber’s politics don’t match Shieh’s — the scholar was an anarchist who helped organize the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the student is a libertarian — Shieh thought Graeber’s designations were illuminating, and incorporated them into his analysis at another student’s suggestion.

If you work in Brown’s communications office, you may have been labeled as “suspect” for meeting the criteria of a “goon,” aka someone whose primary responsibility is “to fight or deceive others on behalf of the university,” per the website. If you work in IT maintenance, you might be in jeopardy of being a “duct taper,” or someone who makes “temporary fixes to systems that could be permanently streamlined.” And if your job includes “assistant” in the title, it’s possible you’re a “flunkie,” or someone whose role exists to “make one’s boss feel more important.”

“I’m sure everybody thinks it’s very important that they have their assistant, but I don’t have an assistant and … I can find and answer my own email,” Shieh said. “So I question if some mid-level associate provost of something something really needs multiple executive assistants.” He also said that Graeber’s labels are not meant to connote “a value judgement. It’s not even saying that their job is useless. It’s just saying we’re looking into it.”

Isn’t it possible that a busy student’s workload might not compare to that of a busy full-time employee, and that the tasks performed by Brown staffers might occur behind the scenes but nevertheless be important? “Well, that’s why we’re asking them, right?” Shieh responded. “That’s the whole point.”

In his Tuesday email to Brown employees, Shieh identified himself as a reporter for The Brown Spectator, a campus journal for libertarian and conservative thought that went dormant years ago. He told The Chronicle that he and other students had planned to relaunch it this semester. Bloat@Brown was supposed to be their first project. He told the employees “we will update our database and ratings when we hear back from you” and to please reply within one week.

Not everyone took Shieh’s inquiry seriously. An employee who answered the phone number for the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library told The Chronicle that he routed the email to his trash folder. “I just thought it was a joke or whatever,” he said. Another staffer told Shieh to “F— off,” according to a reply that Shieh shared with The Chronicle. He did receive some sincere responses. One person who works in the School of Engineering explained that, though his title made it sound like he was part of administration, in reality, “I am a grunt who works hard every day.”

Another person told Shieh that she’s an actor who pretends to be a troubled woman who has dealt with opioid abuse, to help train medical students. In that role, she gives students “a safe environment to practice and try out new ways of communicating to someone without the real-world risks and consequences,” which “is a gift,” she wrote, responding to Shieh’s inquiry about how Brown students would be affected if her position were eliminated. “We have to fail and make mistakes to learn.”

All told, about 20 people replied, according to Shieh. Brian E. Clark, a Brown spokesperson, said in an email that “we were made aware of the launch of this website based on emails that arrived in the inboxes of Brown staff across campus” and that “we’ve advised staff not to respond.”

The university is also “evaluating the situation and the use of data about Brown employees from a policy standpoint,” Clark wrote, “and that review will inform our next steps.”

When Shieh first spoke with The Chronicle, on Thursday, he had a meeting scheduled for that afternoon with an associate dean in the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards. Shieh subsequently declined to comment on that meeting but directed The Chronicle to Dominic Coletti, a program officer who focuses on student-press issues at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Coletti told The Chronicle that Brown is conducting a preliminary review to see if Shieh potentially violated its Code of Student Conduct, specifically its provisions about causing “emotional/psychological harm,” “invasion of privacy,” “misrepresentation,” and “violation of operational rules.” As of Monday, no disciplinary charges have been filed against Shieh, Coletti said. He said FIRE got involved to ensure that Brown upholds its commitment to free expression.

“While we don’t have all the facts and we don’t know what all of the allegations are, if that is all that they have is that he published information” on his Bloat@Brown website, “then that in and of itself is not enough to base an investigation on,” Coletti said.

Shieh has faced other setbacks. Some of his peers were unimpressed by the project — he said it was a topic of conversation and criticism on an anonymous-posting platform called Sidechat. Someone anonymously sent him an email with his own date of birth, address, and Social Security number. He was signed up to receive information from the Democratic National Committee, a retailer called Classic Firearms, and the website eatabagofdicks.com.

Because of the negative attention, including off campus, some of the students who’d planned to relaunch The Brown Spectator with Shieh now think the name is damaged goods, he said. And shortly after the website hosting the database went live, it was hacked, according to Shieh. The database is still disabled as of Monday. But he’s undeterred. “We are currently addressing the attack and will be back online shortly,” the website says. “The truth isn’t going anywhere.”