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.