Brown student exposing Ivy League bloat gives House testimony, urges Congress to ‘mandate transparency'
EXCLUSIVE - Brown University student Alex Shieh, who was recently cleared of wrongdoing after he sent campus employees a DOGE-like email, is testifying Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee on rising costs at elite universities.
"Brown University, like many of its Ivy League peers, presents itself as a selective meritocratic institution," reads Shieh's testimony, obtained exclusively by Fox News Digital.
"But according to data from The New York Times, the median family income of Brown students is over $200,000 — the highest among Ivy League universities," his prepared statement continues. "Forty-seven percent of the student body comes from the top 5% of earners in the U.S. A study by Brown University economist John Friedman confirms that low and middle-income students remain significantly underrepresented at selective colleges including Brown, even after controlling for academic qualifications."
Shieh, a rising junior who was cleared of wrongdoing by the university on May 14, had previously angered school officials by sending a DOGE-like email to non-faculty employees identifying himself as a journalist for The Brown Spectator and asking them what they do all day to try to determine why the school's tuition has gotten so expensive.
The Brown Spectator, a right-leaning publication which has a board of three people, including Shieh, was revived this year after it ceased publication in 2014.
The board members faced a disciplinary hearing on May 7 over allegations that they violated Brown University's name, licensing and trademark policies.
Shieh and the Spectator faced scrutiny from the university after Shieh began investigating positions he deemed redundant after reviewing 3,805 non-faculty employees who worked at Brown and emailing them to ask, "What do you do all day?"
"As an investigative reporter for The Brown Spectator, I launched Bloat@Brown, a website that used AI to analyze administrative staff roles and necessity, and Trialhouse.com, a website that performed similar analysis on Columbia University, Cornell University, and the University of Pennsylvania," Shieh said in his prepared remarks.
"I emailed each administrator at Brown with a request for comment," Shieh added. "Only 20 responded. One… replied with 'F--k off.' Soon after, the university instructed employees not to respond, and the site was hacked. My social security number was leaked. Associate Dean Kirsten Wolfe initiated a disciplinary process against me, first under charges of 'emotional/psychological harm,' 'misrepresentation,' 'invasion of privacy,' and later for alleged technology policy and alleged trademark policy violations."
Shieh sent a follow-up email to Brown administrators on May 27, which Shieh previously told Fox News Digital was "one last opportunity to justify their roles."
In his prepared remarks, Shieh said that tuition and fees at the Ivy League have exceeded $90,000 per year, and that the school is "projected to run a $46 million deficit for the current fiscal year."
"According to Brown's own disclosures, the university employs 3,805 full-time non-instructional staff," Shieh will say in his testimony. "With 7,229 undergraduate students, this translates to one non-teaching staff member for every 1.9 undergraduates. These staff do not include faculty members, but rather administrators, consultants, and support staff, many in roles of unclear necessity."
Shieh is urging the House Judiciary Committee to look into why his school has become so expensive.
His recommendations include subpoenaing Brown University President Christina Paxson "for testimony and documents related to administrative growth, financial aid coordination, and retaliation."
He also calls for student journalists and whistleblowers to be protected from "institutional retaliation," a review of financial aid methodology used by Ivy League schools, transparency in "administrative-to-student staffing ratios and compensation for nonprofit universities receiving federal funds," and for higher learning institutions that have large tuition and spending increases to be audited.
"Thank you for your attention to these matters," Shieh will say in his prepared remarks. "I respectfully urge this Subcommittee to act in defense of students, families, and the American Dream."
A Browkn spokesperson defended university practices in a statement to Fox News Digital.
"As Brown has grown over recent decades in both the number of students we teach and the volume and impact of its research, our staff has expanded to support these important goals. In the last 15 years, we have worked responsibly to build a staff infrastructure that enables us to generate medical treatments and scientific breakthroughs that lead to real solutions for real patients and real people. We also added staffing to prepare students for successful lives and careers, which is important to students and families. Brown's staff members are vital — behind every research breakthrough and student success story, non-faculty staff are a quiet force making those accomplishments possible," the spokesperson said.
"We continue to see a false 'one administrator for every two students at Brown' claim that misrepresents the university, its mission and its student body. A total of 11,232 students were enrolled at Brown in the academic year that just ended — 7,226 of those students were undergraduates. We take no issue with the 3,800 staff number. However, the false "one administrator for every two students" claim ignores the presence of our approximately 4,000 graduate and medical students. These students make up more than one third of our student body, and the staffing to support their advanced education and research is significant. Our staffing numbers should be understood in the context of the fact that Brown is a major research university that supports both undergraduate and graduate education and research. We're not an undergraduate college."
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He had several ongoing student disciplinary cases at the time related to what he described as 'a long and storied career' in on-campus activism. 'They kept trying to evict me,' Sanders said in an interview this week, 'They would go by my dorm and be like, 'Why is all your stuff still here?'' Sanders was the final of the 13 students to receive a degree, to his knowledge. Advertisement 'They mailed it to me in February,' Sanders said. In a statement, Harvard spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo said that the university does not comment on student matters and did not further comment for this story. The impact of the withheld degrees varied by graduate. Phoebe Barr, 24, was among the protesters who were placed on an involuntary leave by the university, meaning she lost access to her dorm room and could not work at her on-campus job for the remainder of the semester. 'I was homeless and unemployed very suddenly,' Barr said. She stayed on the couch of someone who offered her a place to crash. Those are the memories of Harvard she wants to recall, she said, the acts of kindness in the community. 'For all the hostility we received, we also saw a real outpouring of support from the community of Harvard students, faculty, and those who lived around us in Cambridge,' she said. Barr was denied access to the Harvard campus at the end of her senior year. Lane Turner/Globe Staff Barr's temporarily withheld history and literature degree also impacted her search for a job after college: She could not list her undergraduate degree as her highest level of education. Not knowing when she would get her degree, she said, was difficult and stressful as she cobbled together cover letters and resumes. To potential employers, she wrote that her degree was still pending. Her degree was conferred in July last year; she got a job at a Boston University library that fall. Joshi's probation was initially to last until May 2025, meaning she would graduate a year later than planned. That timing was a problem: If she weren't in good standing with the university, she'd lose her Harvard fellowship to fund a master's degree at the University of Cambridge in England. Advertisement The funding securing her spot at Cambridge eventually came through after Harvard conferred her degree over the summer. Sanders, however, said that, at least for him, the lack of a degree didn't have any impact on his professional life. He still moved to California and got his dream job as a union organizer. 'I can't imagine a career in college activism was an inhibitor to becoming a union organizer — it was probably an asset," Sanders said. The encampment taught him how to do effective community organizing, lessons he said he is applying today as he helps organize support for immigrants targeted for Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests. 'It was the most sacred moment of community I have ever felt in my life,' Sanders said of the Harvard encampment. 'No regrets.' A protester hung a Palestine flag in the pro-Palestinian encampment in Harvard Yard on May 7, 2024. Lane Turner/Globe Staff Sanders is now an activist in Oakland and is working as a bartender and waiter (he quit his union organizing job). 'Just like everybody else who graduated on time, I'm figuring life out,' Sanders said. He's thinking of applying to grad school or getting another union organizer job; he still participates in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Had the protesters' probation resulted in them walking at graduation this year, they would've been at a much different ceremony. This May, Garber was greeted by 'It was pretty jarring,' said Barr, who attended the commencement to take part in a pro-Palestinian demonstration. 'Last year, he was booed by the audience.' Advertisement While she is glad to see Harvard fighting Trump, she said it does not negate her frustrations with how the university handled the encampment last year. Joshi added that while there is a lot of excitement for Harvard's stance against Trump, the school's stance on free speech and academic freedom still 'rings hollow' to her. She is now finishing a master's degree in sociology at the University of Cambridge — funded by the Harvard fellowship that almost didn't materialize — and writing her dissertation on South Asian involvement in the Palestinian movement in the UK. After graduation, she plans to find legal work at a nonprofit. Overall, she remembers the Harvard protests as a success: They drew attention to the thousands of children who have died in Gaza and will never have the chance to grow up to get a degree, she said. Material from the Associated Press was used in this report. Erin Douglas can be reached at
