According to Alex Shieh, he is fighting for universities to be “filled with the best and brightest, not the richest and most well connected”  .
The scholar journalist who was a key player in a First Amendment disagreement at Brown University claims that “elite education is in crisis”.
Alex Shieh, a freshman, recently made headlines as a result of his research into operational clutter, which put him in a row with Brown officials.
” Ivy League schools were once viewed as incubators of beautiful minds, and as a result, they served as an economical ladder for bright children from poor families. That American Dream is becoming extremely difficult, he told The College Fix in a recent interview.
Early this spring, Shieh sent an email to every Brown executive asking for information about their work and directing them to the site Bloat@Brown, a initiative of the resurrected traditional student newspaper The Brown Spectator. Operational tasks were classified according to Shieh’s research into three categories: “legality,” “redundancy,” and “bullshit jobs.”
The school swiftly brought a number of charges against him, alleging that his “derogatory” language may have “emotionally harmed” people. Shieh’s self-proclaimed goal was to make Brown “affordable again.” Additionally, he was accused of “improperly using ] information that was accessed through a University engineering platform.”
He believes the current state of higher education is very important given the college dropped the case against Shieh earlier this month.
According to him,” The increase in the cost of schooling has trended with the increase in the number of officials at Brown, which has an academic community of only 7, 200,” he told The Fix via internet.
” I was trying to better understand each person’s role, and to identify who was necessary and who constituted the bloat, so that Brown could become …affordable again,” Shieh ( pictured ) said.
According to his statement, he discovered that the school employs “roughly one executive for every two students, which means that every student physically foots the bill for quarter of an administrator’s income.”
Brown now has 3, 805 non-instructional full-time team members on payment, which is a remarkable number considering Brown now has 7, 229 academic learners, he wrote at Bloat@Brown.
According to his research, Brown employs more than two administrators for every faculty part on payroll, which is in addition to the 1, 691 members of the faculty.
He told The Fix,” I knew it was true retaliation,” and he shared his thoughts about the accusations Brown made against him.
On behalf of the school, associate Dean Kirsten Wolfe threw the entire concept book at me, first attempting to control me for causing “emotional/psychological damage,” “invasion of privacy,” and “misrepresentation,” before reaching a verdict on violations of the IT policy and trademark policy to fully charge me with.
The Brown Spectator is never a recognized “active” scholar business, The Fix recently reported, so the school initially claimed Shieh misrepresented himself as a blogger. But, that state was eventually dropped.
Shieh continued,” While Brown will argue that they were trying to control me over non-speech related issues like trademarks and tech violations, it is obvious that they started an investigation of these thin allegations That they felt the need to condemn me for my speech, even if it was directly,”
The College Fix also reached out to Brian Clark, a Brown spokesperson, to get a copy of the university’s opinion of the situation.
Brown has proceeded in full compliance with University policies and applicable procedural safeguards since the start of this case, according to Clark, according to Clark in an email to The Fix.
It is not at all true that this is not a free speech issue, he said, despite the continued public reporting that it is.
According to Clark,” the investigation has focused on investigating whether improper use of non-public Brown data or non-public data systems violated law or policy, whether deliberate targeting of individual employees violated law or policy, and whether there have been violations of Brown’s misrepresentation or name use policies,”
Dominic Coletti, a program officer for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, disagreed, though.
” I think Brown didn’t like Shieh’s journalism, plain and simple,” he said. The university never accepted a single theory as to what exactly Shieh did wrong, and it always accepted that he was Not Responsible. Brown’s retaliatory animus beliegs the changing narrative and lack of evidence, Coletti claimed.
He told The Fix,” Student journalists should be free to report on their institutions ‘ even contentious and unflattering things without fear of repercussions.”
When asked how his classmates responded to the controversy, Shieh claimed that some of them understood his concerns but the majority did not.
Around half of the population seemed to be aware of the notion that Brown is too expensive and that administrative bloat is a factor in this, according to Shieh. However, a large number of people seemed insulting, suggesting that if$ 93 000 is too much, one should enroll elsewhere, perhaps at a community college.
According to him,” I believe such sentiments reflect the elitism at places like Brown, where it seems as though if$ 93 000 is too expensive for you, you don’t belong here.”
According to Shieh, “elite academia is in crisis because of a refusal to accommodate regular Americans and an unaccountable class of bureaucrats who view universities as corporate brands rather than learning institutions.”
” Today, the elite schools are elitist. He said,” I’m fighting for them to be elite in a meritocratic sense, where they are filled with the best and brightest, not the richest and most connected.
MORE: A student journalist from Brown University began looking into administrative gimmicks. He is currently being looked into.
ABOVE: A gate opens to Brown University, Anthony Ricci, and Shutterstock.
Follow The College Fix on Twitter and Like us on Facebook.
