A sophomore at Brown University is facing the school’s wrath after he sent a DOGE-like email to non-faculty employees asking them what they do all day to try to figure out why the elite school’s tuition has gotten so expensive.

“The inspiration for this is the rising cost of tuition,” Alex Shieh told Fox News Digital in an interview.

“Next year, it’s set to be $93,064 to go to Brown,” Shieh said of the Ivy League university. Brown’s website estimates the total charges to attend the school for the 2025-2026 school year is even higher at $95,984.

“‘And I think that’s crazy,” he added. “I don’t understand why it costs that much. And I never understood why it cost that much, but then I did some digging and I discovered that the reason why the price of college in general across the nation, but also particularly at Brown, has been rising over the past few decades. Far outpacing inflation is because we’re adding on administrative staff faster than we’re adding students, faster than we’re having professors, administrators.” 

IVY LEAGUE STUDENT ACCUSED OF CAUSING ‘EMOTIONAL HARM’ TO NON-FACULTY STAFF FOR SENDING DOGE-LIKE EMAIL 

The total cost of attending Brown University for the 2019-2020 school year was $78,706.00, a 3.62% increase from the previous year. It’s risen steadily since then and is projected to be nearly $96,000 in the 2025-26 school year.

Using AI during some free weekends in March from a common room in his dorm’s basement that routinely floods whenever it rains – making plastic tarps for the shared work and leisure space a necessity for a school that charges students around $90,000 per year -Shieh set out to determine what Brown employees did and why the school was so expensive.  

He formatted his site to identify three particular jobs: “DEI jobs, redundant jobs, and bulls–t jobs.” 

Shieh said he wanted to look into DEI because of President Donald Trump’s executive orders and his administration threatening to withhold federal funds to universities with DEI policies. 

Shieh created a database of the 3,805 non-faculty employees of Brown University. He also emailed them asking them, “What do you do all day?” Shieh wrote that he identified myself as a journalist for The Brown Spectator, a dormant on-campus libertarian journal that a group of students is planning to relaunch.

“I used AI to sort of give them rankings to see how useful or not useful they might be,” Shieh said. 

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“But the thing about AI is that it always works better when you have more data,” Shieh said. “So I decided to email all these administrators so that I could get more data, in their words, about what they do, what their job is. Simple questions like that, because I thought that could just help make my model even more accurate.”

The response to his query was not what he expected. 

“People seemed to get very upset,” Shieh said. “Brown told the administrators not to respond to my email. And instead, I just got a lot of hostile replies.” 

In an op-ed published Tuesday in Pirate Wire, Shieh said that only 20 of the 3,805 people emailed responded, with some replies allegedly saying, “f–k you,” and another directing Shieh to “stick an entire cactus up [his] a–.”

“I had my social security number leaked by somebody who I imagine is probably a rogue administrator, because I don’t know who else would have my social security number,” Shieh said. 

Shieh said he is facing several possible disciplinary charges as part of a preliminary review from the school, including claims of emotional and psychological harm, invasion of privacy, misrepresentation, and violation of operational rules.

Just the News published a redacted version of the Preliminary Review Notification, which accused Shieh of accessing “proprietary University data system which maintains confidential human resources, financial, and student information and used this information to produce a publicly available website, resulting in emotional distress for several University employees.” 

Dominic Coletti, student press program officer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), is working with Shieh on the matter.

“There is not yet a clear allegation the firm has given of exactly what the information is, that is, confidential,” Coletti added. “There’s not a clear allegation of exactly how these emails or this database invade an employee’s privacy or inflicted emotional or psychological harm.” 

Coletti said the charges of psychological harm are unclear. 

“The misrepresentation charge is actually particularly galling from FIRE’s perspective as advocates for free speech and free press because the allegation there is maybe the most substantiated, but it’s also the most specious in my opinion, which is that by requesting or by representing himself as a reporter for the Brown Spectator, Alex was misrepresenting himself because Brown doesn’t recognize the paper, which is absurd on its face, right?” Coletti said. 

Similarly, Coletti said, the claim of misrepresentation doesn’t make sense. It’s related to The Brown Spectator no longer being a student group.

“Brown doesn’t recognize the New York Times or Fox News or any number of other outlets because they’re not student groups, but that doesn’t make a student who reports for those outlets any less legitimate a reporter than Alex was here,” Coletti said. 

For Shieh, he just hopes that his story will help bring reform to the education system.

“I would say that I think the charges are ridiculous. And I think people agree. I mean, like, Elon Musk just reposted this,” Shieh said. “I think people across the country realize that the price of education is out of control. And I think the fact that Brown is telling people not to respond, that they’re doing all this other action against me, shows they’re trying to hide something, and I think that people can see right through that.” 

Fox News Digital reached out to the university about whether Shieh is facing any punishment, but did not immediately receive a response. 

In a previous statement to Fox News Digital, an university spokesperson said, “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. 

They added, “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.”