Jaryn Crouson writes for the Daily Caller about one Ivy League school’s response to a student’s basic questions about university operations.
Brown University has opened an investigation into a student for sending emails to administrators asking them what they do in a day.
The 20-year-old sophomore at the university, Alex Shieh, sent emails to all 3,805 administrators at Brown asking them to “Describe what tasks you performed in the past week.” Now the school is investigating him for inflicting “Emotional/Psychological Harm” on the staff, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
School officials accuse Shieh of obtaining confidential information and are requiring him to send proof he has deleted the content, essentially requiring the student to incriminate himself, something that Brown’s policies are supposed to protect him from. Shieh denies he obtained any confidential information.
Brown quickly attempted to silence Shieh. The student says the site he created to log the information that he captured in his investigation, titled Bloat@Brown, was hacked by someone with a university IP address not long after he sent the emails to administrators. Shieh also received an anonymous email threatening him with his own Social Security number.
“I expected some level of engagement, but only 20 people got back, one of whom only replied with a ‘fuck you,’ and another of whom suggested I ‘stick an entire cactus up [my] ass,’” Shieh wrote in Pirate Wires. “Immediately after the business day started, Brown sent a memo to employees ordering them not to respond. Someone leaked my Social Security number (only those in the registrar’s office should have access to it); someone else from a Brown IP address hacked the site; and there was a coordinated effort to flood my inbox with every porn newsletter on the internet.”
Shieh was attempting to uncover not only redundant or unnecessary jobs, but any diversity, equity and inclusion positions that would now be in violation of federal directives.
