A sophomore undergraduate student at Brown University named Alex Shieh is trying to get on board the DOGE train by exposing all the waste and fraud going on at his school. He has started a website called Bloat@Brown to catalog all the criminal waste, and he’s desperately spamming Twitter to get Elon Musk’s attention.

He has a methodology that he documents. He’s feeding the list of Brown University employees to an AI he has loaded with an algorithm to identify all the bad actors in the university hierarchy, which seems to be flagging everyone other than Alex Shieh himself, who is a legacy admission, the son of a wealthy alum. This is the entirety of his program.

Bloat@Brown’s algorithm scrapes publicly available internet sources for each employee and role (brown.edu pages, articles, LinkedIn pages, job postings, etc.) and searches our database for co-workers with similar roles—similar to how a human would conduct internet research. These online sources are passed to an LLM, which makes its judgments solely based on the retrieved sources.

His program sorts through all the positions at Brown, sorting them into three categories: illegal jobs, redundant jobs, and bullshit jobs. I’m relieved that we don’t have a similar naive young student here at UMM passing judgement on me.

Here’s how he defines “illegal jobs”.

DEI: Does the role involve diversity, equity, and inclusion, which may violate the Civil Rights Act following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard?

Antisemitism: Has the employee publicly voiced antisemitic ideas, which the Trump Administration asserts is a violation of the Civil Rights Act?

You can tell his mind has been poisoned by conservatives. They all think that any role that allows a non-white person, or non-male person, is criminal. Also, you know that he’s going to label opposition to murdering Palestinians as anti-semitism.

His “redundancy” is similarly gooey.

Automation: Can the role be automated using current technology?

Overlap: Is the employee assigned to responsibilities that could otherwise be completed by other employees with overlapping responsibilities?

I’d be in trouble here. Our biology discipline employs 9 faculty — what a waste! All you need is one biologist, right? I’m sure Mr Shieh is fully aware of the breadth of biology and knows exactly how many people you need to teach it.

The real fun begins when he starts describing “bullshit jobs”. He has probably never worked in a real job in his life, but he knows which ones are unnecessary, because he read a book once.

“Bullshit Jobs: A Theory” is a 2018 book by David Graeber that describes five types of useless jobs.

Flunkie: Does the role exist primarily to make one’s boss feel more important (e.g., receptionists, assistants, etc.)?

Goon: Is the employee’s primary responsibility to fight or deceive others on behalf of the university (e.g., litigators, PR specialists, marketers, etc.)?

Duct Taper: Is the employee’s primary responsibility to make temporary fixes to systems that could be permanently streamlined (e.g., data entry, IT maintenance staff, etc.)?

Box Ticker: Is the employee’s primary responsibility to create superfluous outputs (e.g., memo writers, newsletter writers, etc.)?

Taskmaster: Is the employee a manager whose primary responsibility is to assign unnecessary tasks to their subordinates (e.g., middle management)?

Cool. So all receptionists and secretaries and assistants do is fluff the ego of the boss? Good to know. Personally, I’ve found the staff indispensable — they keep all the records, they know where stuff is, they track deadlines, they organize everything. My university would fall apart without them. At Brown, though, I guess the college president handles all the details; the faculty are all independent and don’t get reminders of all the work outside teaching and research that they’re expected to do.

I guess recruiting and PR at Brown is done by “goons” running around, lying about the university, and fighting prospective students. Every Fall a new crop of freshmen are hog-tied and dumped into the dorms. Yeah, let’s get rid of those guys.

Can he get any more patronizing? Maintenance staff are just “duct tapers”; why not set up university IT right from the very beginning, so you don’t need someone to patch it and maintain it? Also, no one needs “data”, let alone someone to “enter” it.

There is something called institutional memory, and it’s preserved by all those memos and documents that someone has to write, and that get sent around to all of us. That’s the glue that makes a university an institution with a purpose and a body of procedures to keep it running.

I guess we need to get rid of all middle management, it doesn’t do anything. All we need is a president who tells us what to do, and then the faculty who do the teaching and research, and anything in between is superfluous. Wait, who is doing the accounting to make sure I get a paycheck? Who is maintaining the buildings and infrastructure? Who turns on the heat in the winter? You mean I have to do all that now, because Alex Shieh thinks it would be more efficient?

Every university has a few entitled students — I was once told by a student that I needed to run down to the prep room to get some reagents for him right now because he “pays my salary” — but Alex Shieh takes that to a whole new level. I think maybe part of his education ought to be spending some time serving as a flunkie, a goon, taping ducts and ticking boxes. But he doesn’t have to because he’s apparently a rich privileged child of a rich privileged mommy and daddy.

There’s a fun discussion of Alex Shieh on Bluesky. He’s been following Musk’s lead and writing to the employees of Brown University and demanding that they justify their job, and getting some replies.

Oh, that poor little boy is getting dragged.

I’ve spent my entire career training students in STEM, and sending them off to graduate and professional schools to become scientists and doctors and dentists and veterinarians and nurses and research technicians. That may be ending sooner than I expected. Entire fields are drying up right now.

Admissions in some graduate programs have have been cut in half or paused altogether, said Emilya Ventriglia, president of UAW 2750, the union representing around 5,000 early career researchers at NIH facilities in Bethesda, Maryland, and elsewhere.

“At this rate, with the hiring freeze, there may be no Ph.D. students next year if it’s not lifted soon, because usually people make their decisions by April,” Ventriglia said.

Spring is when we’re accustomed to hearing joyful news from our students who have applied to and gotten in to the programs they wanted. It’s kind of quiet around the campus this year. A lot of students who have been working hard for four years are being told that their progression is over, and are having to rethink their life suddenly.

I’m worried, too. Universities around the country have suffered declining enrollments, and it’s going to make it worse if the perception spreads that universities are a dead end. Government policy is about to kill science and engineering in this country. It’s also a bit ironic that these people who have been railing about DEI and liberal arts and majors that don’t have concrete utility are now using that angle to destroy STEM education.

We might wonder who is going to benefit from this intellectual suicide.

At the University of Nebraska, an institute that works to improve water management for agriculture offered to host a doctoral candidate in hydrology from Ghana and was talking to three other international students. But it had to rescind the offer after it lost USAID funding, said Nicole Lefore, associate director of the school’s Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute.

She now worries about the diplomatic fallout, noting she has met with agriculture ministers in other countries who were educated at land grant universities in the U.S. through USAID programs.

“The university you go to, people have a loyalty to it. And so bringing in generations of students for education and agriculture in the U.S. helped to create those personal connections and then later scientific and diplomatic connections. That’s really important to the soft diplomacy side of what the innovation labs were doing.”

She said she is barraged with emails asking what this will mean.

“The only winner out of this is China, she said. ”Because the countries that are being cut off there, I think they will turn to someone.”

I thought MAGA hated China, but here they go helping that country, and the EU. I’ve got one bright student who is thinking about applying to a university in Mexico. Everyone benefits except the US.

Republicans may seem unstoppable, and the MAGA movement has energized a racist, nativist, nationalist mob. But you know what else seemed unstoppable? The Ku Klux Klan. A hundred years ago, the KKK was marching by the thousands in parades across the country, and had installed multiple members in governorships. It was, for a while, the MAGAs of yesteryear. It fundamentally eradicated and forced to go underground, although of course its sympathizers were still lurking in our society, usually afraid to speak out loud.

One of the reasons it faded was because some people were not afraid to speak against the Klan, even when the establishment used their power to harass good people. Good people like George Dale.

George Dale, the founding editor of The Muncie Post-Democrat, had published his first attack on the Klan in 1922. Dale charged that Delaware County Circuit Court Judge Clarence Dearth was a Klansman who stacked juries with those of his ilk and gave light sentences to Klansmen convicted in his court.

Dearth subsequently found Dale in contempt of court and the editor spent his life savings defending his First Amendment right to print factual information, a story picked up by the national press.

Republican and Democratic newspapers across the country lauded Dale for his heroism, and readers nationwide contributed to his legal defense fund.

By 1927, The Post-Democrat’s circulation had swelled to 18,000—more than seven times its 1923 readership. By 1928, Klan membership statewide had dwindled to 7,000 from an estimated 300,000 at its peak.

He stood up for what was right, and he used ridicule to do it.

Klan ideology in the ’20s also differed from its focus during the Civil Rights Movement in the ’50s and ’60s. While never friendly to African Americans, the “second wave” of the Klan was mostly interested in halting immigration, undermining perceived Catholic and Jewish influence in American politics and schools, enforcing Prohibition, and protecting the “purity of American womanhood.” A new religious movement, Protestant fundamentalism, also fueled the Klan’s rise, with ideologues hijacking religion to stir up nativism. It’s no coincidence that 1925 was the year both of Stephenson’s trial in Indiana and the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee.

George Dale and others went to work documenting the hypocrisy of the Klan’s basic principles — from “100% Americanism” to a ludicrous KKK resolution passed in Muncie proclaiming that Jesus Christ was a white Protestant native-born American and not a Jew.

This was Indiana, after all, the state that had unsuccessfully tried to decree that pi had a value of precisely 3.2, back in 1897. They failed again when they tried to decree that Jesus Christ was a white Protestant American. (note: this excerpt is heavily larded with sarcasm.)

Muncie Klan N o. 4 Friday night by a unanimous vote, passed a resolution endorsing Jesus Christ, the resolution appearing in full the next day in a local newspaper. The question of the divinity of the Redeemer had been previously submitted to a committee consisting of Rev. Walter Gibson, Deacon Court Asher and Elder Willie Moy, the Chinese goblin, who reported unanimously in favor of the fundamentalists. When the resolution was presented one kluxer introduced an amendment to the effect that Jesus was not a Jew, but a native born, white Protestant American. The resolution went through unanimously but the contaminated, hireling, Papist press refused to print that part of it. Copies of the resolution were sent to the theological gentlemen in New York who have lately been staging a wordy conflict between faith and science. Its perusal will no doubt be a great aid in settling the argument.

And yes, let us not forget that 1925 was also the year of the Scopes monkey trial, which besmirched the reputation of another state, Tennessee, that is now also a stronghold of MAGA foolishness.

These know-nothing racist fools have infested this country long enough. Be like George Dale, and beat them back.

It’s very useful to read some Nazi history nowadays. In particular, here in America it’s 1933 all over again; Mark Greif explains what phase of fascism we’re in.

In historical terms, the event we are witnessing is an attempt at Gleichschaltung. The Nazi term is usually translated “coordination,” sometimes “consolidation” or “streamlining.” In this phase of totalitarianism, the Movement, now elected to power, uses its hold on the legitimate authority of the state to try, illegitimately, to align neutral, nonpartisan, or independent institutions with the extra-state Movement, forging an obligation to the Leader rather than to the constitutional state.

The hallmark of totalitarianism at this stage isn’t genocide or extremes of violence. It is doubled or twofold organization. The Movement (here MAGA) or its party (here the Republican Party, parasitically devoured and replaced from within) generates a vision of second institutions, however hallucinatory or inverted, with which original or real institutions are then coordinated.

The task of coordination is to reshape, refound, purge, and, by all means foul and fair, shake the underlying basis of institutions and install new, arbitrary ones. Because institutions only subsist by their personnel, a Gleichschaltung should unnerve the committed participants in institutions, first within government and then in civil society, and mold minds toward constant doubt and adjustment. Personnel should feel that they require alignment with the leader, or acknowledgment of arbitrary or irrelevant Movement goals, simply to continue to work and to avoid baseless investigation or denunciation.

Here’s another source defining the term, with a focus on the Christian resistance to Naziism. One of the early goals of National Socialism was to align the churches with their vision of the Reich.

“Gleichschaltung” (coordination) is a term coined by the National Socialists that actually trivializes the massive restrictions on fundamental rights and freedoms. Immediately after Hitler’s still entirely legal seizure of power on January 30, 1933, the National Socialists set about “coordinating” all public and private life in Germany, particularly in the areas of politics, social associations, the economy, the press, and culture.

In concrete terms, this meant that all movements and opinions that were not explicitly National Socialist—not to mention oppositional and critical ones—were suppressed and banned. In many cases, organizations were transformed into corresponding Nazi organizations.

One of the signs that this is going on isn’t that stormtroopers are taking over institutions by force — rather, the institutions are sown with doubt and uncertainty, so that they are hesitant and avoid disagreement. One recent example: a guest on one of these ubiquitious talk shows says I Might Lose My Job For Saying This, But What Trump’s Doing Is Insane, and the host nervously scrambles to downplay it. It’s not insane, the CNBC host says, it’s a tactic. She’s right, but you know, it can be both. What’s worrisome is the desperate need for our news sources to pretend to be neutral, so they can overlook the insanity going on before their eyes.

One of the tools the current regime is using is the Office of Management and Budget. They’re putting out memos strangling the budgets of various offices of the federal government. If they have to walk them back, or if a court decision stops them, no worries — they’ve done their job of fostering uncertainty, and forcing otherwise independent institutions to second guess their decisions, tip-toe around their jobs to avoid the hassle or more MAGA shit-stirring. Gleichschaltung accomplished.

This halt in the circulation of oxygen through the social body—or, in constitutional terms, illegal impoundment of funds authorized by Congress—had the purpose of making all agencies search themselves, their programs, and their recipients for any “activities that may be implicated by any of the President’s executive orders”—those “including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.” A follow-up clarification enumerated seven listed executive order areas whose echoes were specifically to be searched out: those to do with immigrants (“Protecting the American People Against Invasion”), overseas aid, the environment, energy, race and gender or other diversity, trans people (“Defending Women . . . and Restoring Biological Truth”), and abortion.

They’ve also got a convenient scapegoat: trans people.

One thing Trump’s current coordination lacks is Jews; instead of the Jewish pollution, he has transgender. Trans persons are a comparably small minority to Jews, in government as in the general population, but they exist as phantasms ripe for exorcism. The actions so far against trans rights furnish an invitation for ordinary people to distinguish themselves as bigots—hurrying to change bathroom signage or, like the NCAA, rushing to prohibit athletes from sports.

The Jewish population is an inconvenient scapegoat. The far right has tied itself to Israel at the behest of the lunatics of evangelical Christianity, so MAGA can’t outright persecute them, even though there are so many Jewish groups protesting American actions in the Middle East and at home. Those trans weirdos, though — nobody cares about them, MAGA can do what ever criminal actions they want against them without alienating conservative allies. Expect them to make being trans even more criminal than it already is.

Haven’t you noticed yet how thoroughly they’re isolating our trans friends and family? They’re shutting them out of military service, mention of them is banned and grounds for loss of funding, they’re obsessed with demeaning Sarah McBride, Trump is claiming that the existence of transgender people is “hurting women very badly”. But still, it’s the bigotry that many people happily claim as their own righteous belief.

Another American institution that is being undermined by cowardice in the face of the MAGA threat is higher education. Oh no, our universities shouldn’t speak out about the lessons of history, they shouldn’t take a side against fascism, because they are so devoted to neutrality and free speech (well, except for speech against tyranny or genocide).

In 2024 Dictionary.com chose “demure” as the word of the year. On college campuses (or at least in their presidents’ offices and board meeting rooms) the word of the year, in the wake of the war in Gaza and the campus protests that followed, was “neutrality,” which has a similar vibe. One might think that those who embrace neutrality do so either because they have no strong views, or because they do and are afraid to express them. Some university leaders, following the University of Chicago, have tied themselves to the more agreeable notion that were they to weigh in on issues, this would chill speech on campus—that others will be encouraged to speak up if they keep their own mouths shut. The august American Council of Trustees and Alumni has urged all trustees to preserve “the high purpose of our academic institutions” by ensuring that their institutions stay out of political disputes—silence is golden, especially when the heat is on.

Right. We have all this information at our fingertips, we hold a reservoir of deep historical knowledge, but we must not apply it in any practical sense. Don’t make any judgements! This is the core idea The Chicago Principles, that odious chickenshittery that cowardly universities across the country are adopting right and left.

The Chicago principles, also known as the Chicago Statement, are a set of guiding principles intended to demonstrate a commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of expression on college campuses in the United States. Initially adopted by the University of Chicago following a report issued by a designated Committee on Freedom of Expression in 2014, they came to be known as the “Chicago Statement” or “Chicago principles” as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) led a campaign to encourage other universities across the country sign up to the principles or model their own based on similar goals.

Since 2014, a number of other universities have committed to the principles, including Princeton, Purdue, Washington University in St. Louis, and Stanford University. As of September 2024, FIRE reported that 110 U.S. colleges and universities had “adopted or endorsed the Chicago Statement or a substantially similar statement.”

That’s Gleichschaltung. The first hint is that it was cobbled up by FIRE, a reactionary conservative organization that crusades for “content neutrality” on campuses. Nazis should not be condemned, but instead must be allowed to speak with institutional endorsement.

It’s not all bad news. Greif has some ideas about how to fight back.

Simple advice can be offered to anyone in a decision-making role at an institution. Every tub must stand on its own bottom. If you can find solidarity with other institutions like your own, do it. But even when you can’t prevent others from defecting, there need be no solidarity in weakness. Prepare to stand on your own for a bit. Reach into reserves if they exist. Delay programs if you must. Don’t change, or kneel, or find hostages to feed into a slobbering maw. Don’t coordinate yourself, don’t align yourself, don’t appease, when it may yet prove unnecessary.

There may well be normalcy again. But it lies on the other side—not in accommodation to this malevolent insanity, run by lackeys and toads. The risk of overreaction is trivial compared to the risks of accommodation.

Don’t give in! That’s hard, though, when the agents of chaos are holding the purse strings. They know the universities are potential sources of opposition (at least, those that haven’t already caved in to the “Chicago principles”) and moved fast to shock-and-awe them with threats to indirect costs and federal research grants. It’s hard to stand strong when they’re cutting your budget, while some of your fellow institutions are surrendering.

Odd as it may sound, the antidote to totalitarianism, recorded by those who lived through it, is associational life. De-atomization, and the creation of loyalties to other people that can’t be, or simply aren’t, coordinated with a regime. In a time of temptation to the bad, or to the worse, association is what lets people find the courage to refuse, and the practical standing to do so. If things get very bad, it is also associational life that helps people circulate information, hide, escape, and travel. Combinations of associations like churches, clubs, professional or activist societies, local government and local agencies, stretching from close-range to middle-range, are practically efficacious in kinds of details that can’t be seen from above, or aren’t seen until too late and are too banal to punish: accidentally failing to find or arrest someone, sponsoring and sheltering, and passing money.

In past weeks, the emergent centers of refusal and opposition to coordination have been two kinds of institutions, at drastically different scales and positions in the nation-state system: public sector unions, specifically the unions of federal employees of individual agencies; and state governments. Before this month I had not thought anything or even known of the existence of the National Federation of Federal Employees, or the National Treasury Employees Union, or the American Federation of Federal Employees, or the American Foreign Service Association, or for that matter the Federal Bureau of Investigation Agents’ Association or the Federal Law Enforcement Officers’ Association. They, along with state attorneys general, have been filing suits to block the decimation of the workforce.

At every level, people will need to think of decoupling, alongside whatever strengthening of associational life is possible now. Any institution, at any scale, would do well to prepare to sever dependencies or necessary links with organizations larger or higher, even as it thinks of gatherings or sympathies or mutual aid with peers or organizations its own size. Decoupling is a means to halt contagion, preserving the fabric of society in its separate fibers, until a later date. It’s a curious and seemingly contradictory situation to be in, but, again, a means of strength: signal every solidarity you can, but cut the mooring lines that lead from a captured state to a free people.

I know absolutely nothing about stocks. My eyes glaze over if you try to explain the stock market to me. I could be wrong, but isn’t it bad when the line goes down?

I also suspect that it is bad when prices at the grocery store go up, as they’ve been doing lately.

I’ll try not to fall asleep if you explain to me what I’m getting wrong.

I did try to puzzle it out for myself, so I went to some site called Marketwatch to read some articles. This is what it looked like this morning.

I tried, but I got bored. Maybe I’m misunderstanding this, but it doesn’t look like good news for the stock market.

We got another memo from the president of the University of Minnesota, Rebecca Cunningham. We’re failing!

I am writing to you today, as our Twin Cities campus is now the subject of two federal investigations involving allegations of antisemitism: a U.S. Department of Education investigation and a pending U.S. Department of Justice task force campus visit. We also received a failing score on the Anti-Defamation League’s latest campus antisemitism report card.

This is a response to Trump’s search for reasons to punish every university. He doesn’t care about human rights, and neither does the ADL. This is not about antisemitism; it’s a right-wing policy to silence anyone opposing the genocide committed by Israel or promoting the rights of the Palestinian people. I’m sure there is antisemitism to be found on campus, because this is America and it’s simmering everywhere, but the university administration does not endorse it and it is not the majority view here. I support this part of the memo.

There is absolutely no place for antisemitism at the University of Minnesota. In accordance with our institutional values, we firmly and aggressively reject any and all forms of hatred directed toward members of our Jewish community.

Good. That’s official. But what we’re witnessing is a conflation of opposing the actions of the state of Israel with antisemitism, and we have to also defend the right or our students and faculty to oppose and protest the criminal actions of Israel.

The disappointing part of this memo is that it nowhere even mentions Palestinians or the policies of Israel — it just buries them under the label of “antisemitism”. I hope this isn’t their approach when the federal Trumpian investigators descend on campus. Be forthright: we defend the rights of both Jews and Palestinians to exist.

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You know what’s interesting? A Holocaust scholar summarizes the antisemitism he witnessed in the White House.