A Brown University student who took a page out of DOGE’s playbook to try to figure out what thousands of school administrators do says his personal information has been leaked while he is facing an investigation for invasion of privacy and causing emotional harm. 

In an interview with Fox News Digital, the student, Alex Shieh, said he is facing multiple potential disciplinary charges as the school conducts a preliminary review after he sent an email to more than 3,800 administrators asking them to justify their jobs. He said the emails were sent as part of an investigation with the Brown Spectator, which had been inactive on campus for years. 

Some of the potential charges against the student include causing emotional and psychological harm, invasion of privacy, misrepresentation, and violation of operational rules. The conservative news outlet Just The News published a letter sent to him from the associate director of student conduct and community standards, Kirsten Wolfe.

“You accessed a 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,” the letter said. “In addition, you misrepresented yourself to University staff and administrators as a reporter for the Brown Spectator, a student organization that is not currently recognized by the University.”

Besides the review process, Mr. Shieh told Fox News Digital about the “hostile” replies he received after his mass email to university administrators.

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

He said in an op-ed published by Pirate Wire that he received just 20 responses from administrators. One employee replied, “f*** you.”

Another person said he should “stick an entire cactus up [my] ass.”

Additionally, he said his Social Security number was leaked by “somebody who I imagine is probably a rogue administrator.”

Mr. Shieh created a website called Bloat@Brown, where he listed the employees and their jobs.

“The American Dream will soon set Brown students back a whopping $93,064 per year,” a post on the website says. 

It warns that “the 2027–2028 school year at Brown will be the first to come with a six-figure price tag. Yet even while charging each student the price of a luxury car, this fiscal year, Brown is on track to operate at a $46 million budget deficit — dipping into the endowment to stay afloat.”

In light of the soaring cost of tuition, Mr. Shieh said, “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.”

 The site was reportedly subjected to a cyberattack and temporarily disabled. However, on Friday, Mr. Shieh posted on X that the site was functional again. It lists nearly 50 employees that his AI algorithm flagged as “potentially holding illegal DEI roles.”

A spokesman for Brown, Brian Clark, told the Sun that 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,” he said. 

Regarding other claims made by Mr. Shieh about the university’s investigation and fallout from his email, Mr. Clark said, “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.”

A student press program officer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Dominic Coletti, told Fox News Digital that there is “not a clear allegation of exactly how these emails or this database invade an employee’s privacy or inflicted emotional or psychological harm.”

Mr. Coletti also pushed back on Mr. Clark’s comment about the Brown Spectator not being recognized by the campus by noting the university does not “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.”