How to become a right-wing star? Harass people

A Brown student used crummy AI to label university staff as worthless; now he has a Times profile and is testifying to Congress

Here is one version of the story: A Brown University student created a shoddy AI that labeled individual university administrative employees with terms like “DEI,” “antisemitism,” and “flunkie.” He emailed all of the employees, using a DOGE style format, telling them about their evaluation, asking them to justify their job, and promising to publish the response. Staff complained, the university started a preliminary review of the student, but concluded he had done nothing wrong.

Here is a second version of the story: A conservative student concerned about about high tuition costs questioned the work of university staff. His free speech rights were threatened when the university subjected him to disciplinary hearings.

Anyway, you will never guess which version made the Times!

This is a good example of how the news is not just the news. Story framing is a choice. The author, Jeremy Peters,¹ frames the story around the protagonist, Alex Shieh. We are told that Shieh is concerned about rising costs in higher education, as is the Trump administration. The case “became the latest flashpoint in the free speech wars on American college campuses.”

It is not until later, in paragraph eight, that we learn that Shieh and other students he had worked with were cleared of wrongdoing. Even so, this comes with a caveat: “But their case is yet another example of how universities continue to struggle with protecting the rights of students to express themselves on campus, after years of trying to adjudicate just when political expression tips into harassment.”

So I want to dig into what Shieh did in a little more detail than was covered in the Times piece.

Lets start with his online database. It tells you how much “federal funds were lost by Brown” before introducing “Brown’s sprawling bureaucracy.” In public statements, Shieh has made the implication explicit: DEI bureaucrats cost Brown more than $500 million. This absolves President Trump from any responsibility, and ignores the issue of a President using federal power to crush campus dissent. (Peters offers a different take in the Times, but one that also similarly absolves Trump: withholding the money is “part of a campaign to hold universities accountable for tolerating pro-Palestinian activism that many Jewish students and faculty saw as antisemitic.”)

Individual staff are then listed, which you can search for by name, title, department, or “DEI” (yes, that is a specific category). Once you find an employee and their title, you are invited to click on a post that will share their information on X. (I blocked the name of the employee below).

In other words, a core function of the site is to post information about “suspect” and “DEI” employees onto a website where they could predictably face harassment. Once you click on the link, it generates an automated X post, with the employees name and title, tagging their employer.

Believe it or not, this is the good version of the site. In previous versions, the AI generated automated rankings for each individual for the categories of “legality” (did they work in DEI roles), “redundancy” (was more than one person performing the same role) and “bullshit jobs.” Shieh’s posts also appeared to have labeled employees on categories like “antisemitism.”

What Shieh built was a harassment machine.

It was a machine that automated the identification of individual employees at a private institution based on what we can safely assume was bad AI given the lack of detailed information needed to satisfy the vague criteria it relied on. It was a machine that invited public ridicule and intimidation, which Shieh hoped to amplify to the broadest possible platform with help from people like Musk.

One other thing Peters does not mention is his article is that Shieh is expanding his harassment empire. It’s not just Brown. He is now moving on to other Ivy League schools.

An aside: the sweaty desire to get Musk’s attention is truly pitiful. Here is the justification for the “We caught Elon Musk’s attention” tagline above.

Wow indeed.

Anyway, given what I have told you, let me ask if Peters’ summary of Shieh’s database accurately conveys its nature? As you might guess, I don’t think it does. Here it is:

First, he created a database that listed all 3,800 staff and administrative positions at Brown and categorized them based on an A.I.-powered analysis of the work each position entailed. Then, when he sent the email on March 18, Mr. Shieh included a link to his website along with the questions about job responsibilities. He also asked employees to comment on his characterizations of their work, since not all of them were flattering.

What got attention to Shieh was his emails to staff (below).

Note that “The Brown Spectator” did not actually exist at this point, and so the university investigated if he falsely represented himself as a reporter affiliated with a university organization. Shieh later unveiled the Brown Spectator as a non-affiliated non-profit. The university also accused him and two other students of infringing trademarks when they finally did launch the Brown Spectator.

Nor surprisingly, staff complained. When Shieh was subject to a preliminary review, the conservative world rallied to his side. The university did not proceed to a full investigation.

In interviews and public discussions, Shieh emphasizes the emails he sent. He mentions the database, but does not dwell much on it, or the implications for the employees profiled. Peters, and other news coverage take the same tack. Student sends emails to university staff, faces retaliation from Ivy League institution. This matters a lot, because the emails were the least objectionable part of his actions.

What other choices might Peters have made with this story?

Rather than centering Shieh, he might have talked to the university employees fed into this database. If Peters interviewed any of the staff, he did not diclose it. They are mentioned, but the tone is almost jocular: “A few replies seemed to forget the Queen’s English.” What a wag! “Some employees took umbrage with having their jobs described as wasteful and insignificant.” Indeed, sir! The potential for harms to the staff is not considered.

A Brown University spokesperson is mentioned but offers little. The the only other people whose voices were included were a representative from FIRE who supported Shieh, other students who were investigated, and a conservative professor who supported Shieh.

So let me tell you a third version of the story: A student wants to break into the world of conservative media. What Musk is doing at DOGE gives him an angle. He builds his harassment machine not because he is seriously interested in evaluating what these employees do, but because they are useful fodder for the materials of his ambitions.

And it works.

Musk eventually reposts. If you go to Shieh’s social media page it is post after post of his media appearances. The harassment machine is an incredibly successful project, allowing him to reach new levels of fame, which is why he is expanding it to other universities. The result of his bullying was that he was able to successfully play the victim, even as urges the government to punish Brown on his behalf.

This is another thing that Peters does not tell us about. Why might faculty or staff be a tad sensitive with a student labeling them as “DEI” or “suspect”? It is because they are already deeply subject to extraordinary scrutiny and living through a government attack on higher ed? I don’t think there is any other industry which embeds hostile reporters in the organization in which you work, with the goal of publicizing any misstep you make. But if you are in higher education, you can expect reporters at Campus Reform or The College Fix to play exactly this role, hoping to elevate their status in the conservative media world, such as Breitbart, The Daily Caller, or NewsMax. If you are really lucky, you might hit Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, or even the New York Times!

As someone who has been on campus for the past 25 years, I see the rise of this media has had a much more negative chilling effect on campus speech than wokeness ever did. This is not a story that Peters tells, and it is not an aspect of campus speech that FIRE, for all its concerns about self-censorship, seems committed to addressing. If students are policing your pronouns, that seems to be a major free speech issue. If students are trying to start a media pile-on, often by misrepresenting your work, values or statements, it is not. This seems like an obvious and perhaps intentional blind spot for many free speech warriors.

Peters tells us that “Fox News, Charlie Kirk and The New York Post ran with stories about what they saw as this new affront.” Peters does not mention that Charlie Kirk got his start in the conservative movement by posting Professor Watchlist, advertised as “unmasking radical Professors.” He may have seen something of himself in Shieh.

And Shieh may have seen a role model in Kirk. Kirk never went to college, but made his name by building a database naming individual faculty and selling himself as an expert on campus speech. His organization Turning Point has college chapters, and he is now a huge player in the conservative political/media world. Rather than work for a conservative news outlet like Campus Reform, Shieh formed his own. The harassment machine means he is not just reporting a story, he is the story.

Shieh was profiled not just in conservative media and the Times, but also USA Today. The profile similarly positive, failing to provide even a cursory description of the database Shieh built. It does note that he was invited to testify to Congress, where he talked about the Brown employees he emailed:

Some of them answered, and the ones who answered seemed to have pretty useful jobs. I guess we can infer that the ones who didn't have jobs that are not so important.

Is that what we can infer? Or that Shieh’s espoused beliefs and the reality of how universities work are completely different spheres?

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I don’t know if Professor Watchlist or Shieh’s website had any tangible effect on the employees identified, beyond making them feel uneasy. What I describe does not amount to the legal definition of harassment (although Peters uses it), so pick some other word if you dislike that one (intimidation? shaming? surveillance?) But it does fit with a broader pattern of publicly posting information about private individuals who are deemed to be radical or ideologically suspect, or just not a good use of resources.

As I’ve written about before, there are organizations that have successfully profiled individual federal employees to encourage their firing for being “DEI” or “woke.” Musk has attacked random individual employees himself, upending their lives. While on the one hand, people like Musk and Shieh speak to the need for free speech, they very much want to shut down speech they dislike, including firing people for holding other beliefs.

And they now have a President who agrees with them, one who is looking for excuses to destroy universities. For example, the Department of Justice is investigating Harvard because the student-run Harvard Law Review not managed by the university issued a private letter of reprimand to a student who leaked thousands of pages of information to a conservative media outlet. The student now works for Trump advisor Stephen Miller. The Department of Justice has told Harvard University to withdraw the letter, which they did not issue. The double standard becomes all the more galling when you remember that the Trump administration is engaged in an all-out war on leakers. But some leaks are good, if they discredit your enemies, and give you the means to control them.

One obvious lesson here is that Brown University should have simply ignored a guy seeking publicity instead of handing it to him. But this also seems a bit too pat and unsatisfying. Rather than engage in serious arguments about higher education costs, Shieh was trying to subject individual employees who had done nothing wrong to public hostility. This is an increasing problem for universities. At a minimum they should not be baited into punishing staff and students by such bad-faith antics. But can they do anything other than simply ignore the attacks?

Just pause for a second: imagine an employee in most other organizations did what Shieh did. What would happen? Most likely, they would be fired. Ah, you say, but the student is not an employee, but a paying customer of Brown. So lets say a customer did this. They might be politely ignored, or even asked to take their custom elsewhere. My point is that by being on campus, the student enjoys a higher expectation of free speech without punishment than in pretty much any other venue in American life. This particular student enjoys a greater expectation of free speech than he is willing to provide to others on the same campus.

And this is good! To be clear, I think Brown was wrong to initiate an investigation,² which itself was chilling. The student could rely on FIRE and other free speech advocates, the New York Times, and the conservative media ecosystem to come to his aid. In this case I agree with them. But I doubt they would have tolerated the same sort of dissent and harassment from inside their own organizations. And they do not see Shieh’s actions as chilling or dangerous to speech of others in any way. Again, who is defined as the protagonist matters a lot to the story about free speech you want to tell.

At the end of the day, Brown gets bad press for being deemed insufficiently supportive of speech even though they ultimately supported it to a greater degree than we would see in most other organizations. Even though it was more tolerant of speech it disliked than its critics would ever be.

1. Full disclosure, in 2018 Peters interviewed me about crackdowns on campus speech by conservatives in what I thought was a balanced piece.

2. Brown might argue that they did not formally launch an investigation, but a preliminary review in response to complaints. I don’t know their policies well enough to weigh in on this.