Bloat@Brown: DOGE Comes to Brown University

Summary

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Campus Files: Bloat@Brown – DOGE Comes to Brown University

Podcast: Campus Files: Scandals, Secrets & Crimes at American Universities
Episode Date: April 15, 2026
Host/Reporter: Ian Mont
Featured Speakers: Alex Shea, Karim Zodi
Theme: Administrative Bloat, Free Speech, and Conservative Activism at Brown University

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Overview

This episode dives into a campus controversy mirroring national trends: a student at Brown University, Alex Shea, launches a lone crusade against perceived administrative bloat, inspired by the federal government's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Trump's second term. The episode explores how Shea’s tech-driven “investigation” and provocative tactics ignite backlash, spark national media coverage, and reveal sharp divides not just between students and administrators, but among conservatives themselves.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. National Context and Rise of DOGE

• [01:27] The episode opens with the post-2025 inauguration climate, as the federal DOGE agency slashes bureaucratic jobs, declaring government servants “wasteful and corrupt at best, incompetent at worst.”
• This anti-bureaucracy movement quickly trickles down to the campus arena.

2. Meet Alex Shea: Conservative Legacy & Media Prodigy

• [02:41–03:53] Alex candidly describes choosing Brown for prestige and career prospects and acknowledges his privilege as both an Andover and legacy admit.
• [03:46] Shea’s visibility grows after writing publicly in support of rolling back affirmative action, landing him viral Fox News spots and immediate notoriety among incoming Brown students.

3. Reinvigorating Conservative Media at Brown

• [04:29–05:14] Conservative donors and the Fund for American Studies prompt Alex to revive The Brown Spectator, the right-leaning campus paper, with Ben Marcus as editor-in-chief.

4. Provocation vs. Persuasion: Internal Spectator Debates

• [05:42–06:56] At the Spectator’s first meeting, Alex urges writers to “be the campus’s Fox News” — a posture that alarms conservative colleague Karim Zodi, who worries notoriety is prioritized over productive debate.
  • Notable quote:
    “You shouldn't really pursue notoriety at all costs because...the Fox News approach on campus would just lead to liberal people making fun of the publication or being offended by it and not engaging with the ideas.”
    — Karim Zodi, [06:20]

5. The Administrative Bloat Project

• [07:06–07:53] Sparked by tuition jumps at Brown ($97,000/year), Alex pins blame on administrative bloat — the growth of non-faculty staff — a theory he draws from Andrew Yang’s "The War on Normal People."
• [09:21–11:16] Alex uses web scraping and AI to build a list of 3,805 staff, categorizing them by DEI focus, redundancy, and “bullshit jobs.”
  • He conducts a mass email survey in the middle of the night, seeking staff justification for their roles, mirroring Musk’s DOGE tactics in government (failure to respond signals resignation).
• [11:36] Brown reacts within hours, ordering the survey ignored and launching a student conduct investigation.

6. Campus and Spectator Reactions: Shock, Divides, and Fallout

• [14:18] Karim finds the stunt “funny” but quickly sees it as a blunder — the survey is sweeping and insensitive, including vital support staff (dining, custodial).
  • “It wasn’t a detailed survey…It went out to, from what I can tell, literally everyone … that was employed by Brown.”
    — Karim Zodi, [14:50]
• [15:18] Spectator staff are blindsided; Alex did not consult them, leaving peers responsible for a backlash they didn’t author.
• [16:01] Alex is pleased by the attention:
  • “This really got people talking, which I guess I was happy about.”
    — Alex Shea, [15:46]
• [16:03] But Karim notes that the buzz is about the spectacle, not substantive debate about administrative cost.

7. Media Explosion and Codes of Conduct

• [16:48–18:20] As the story spreads (Chronicle of Higher Ed, Newsweek, Pirate Wires), Student Conduct charges Alex with violations: emotional harm, privacy invasion, misrepresentation, and tech misuse.
  • Alex:
    “The initial things that they were investigating me for were emotional psychological harm, invasion of privacy, misrepresentation … and violation of the technology policy.”
    — [16:48]
• [18:04] Karim believes Brown’s “heavy-handed” response gave Alex more ammunition and visibility.

8. Formal Hearings and Aftermath

• [20:01] University drops the misrepresentation charge; hearing proceeds on technology violations. Alex fought for, and won, a neutral professor as arbitrator.
  • “You’re not allowed to bring an attorney … none of these protections are afforded … to their credit, there's a neutral arbitrator.”
    — Alex Shea, [20:01]
• [20:37] Ultimately, the charges “go away,” prompting another round of press coverage and Alex declaring vindication.

9. A Conservative Divides Conservatives

• Karim pens a (published) takedown arguing Alex’s approach sabotaged meaningful debate and failed to foster understanding.
  • “He didn’t have a productive conversation with anyone... All he did was get attention for himself, which I think is maybe, from his own perspective, worthwhile. But that doesn’t do anything to advance the issues...”
    — Karim Zodi, [22:39]
• [23:52] Critiques include Alex’s use of unreliable AI (“AI...adopts and regurgitates the viewpoints of the person using them”) and the counter-productive tone of the survey.

10. The DEI Debate: Bias, Inconsistency, and Broader Implications

• [24:29–24:44] Alex opposes DEI and affirmative action, seeing them as counter to meritocracy, and justifies his stance by pointing to the Trump administration’s DEI bans.
• [24:59] Karim accuses Alex of selectively policing affinity groups, overlooking others like religious centers, revealing inconsistencies and a lack of focus.

11. Aftershocks: Layoffs and Claims of Victory

• [26:22] Brown lays off 48 employees, cuts 55 unfilled positions (Sept 2025).
  • Alex:
    “I view this as vindication...this is what I've been advocating all along...school will function fine with 103 positions gone.”
    — [26:34]
• [26:53–27:20] Brown disputes Alex’s claim: says layoffs result from federal policy and settlements, not his campaign.
  • Brown spokesperson: The claim is “entirely fictional.”

12. Did Anything Change on Campus?

• [28:25] Karim sees no real shift:
  • “I don’t think it changed anyone’s mind... I think it further put people off the kind of conservative sphere online.”
• [29:00] Alex drops out, lands (then leaves) Palantir, raises funds for an anti-fraud tech startup self-described as “private sector DOGE.”

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Notable Quotes

• “The Fox News approach on campus would just lead to liberal people making fun of the publication...not engaging with the ideas.”
  — Karim Zodi, [06:20]
• “I wanted to do a survey...I guess Elon Musk and the federal government with Doge took a similar approach just a couple weeks earlier.”
  — Alex Shea, [09:41]
• “Alex made a website and he published the website and sent all the emails. I believe that he didn’t discuss it with his other members...”
  — Karim Zodi, [15:18]
• “It ultimately led to layoffs…so I think in retrospect, it completely was the right move and it achieved the desired results.”
  — Alex Shea, [25:56]
• “The obvious and I think better explanation for all of this is the fact that Brown has had to pay a massive fine to the Trump administration.”
  — Karim Zodi, [27:20]
• “We just found 250 million in fraudulent government spending ...so that’s why we raised 5.1 million to start the anti-fraud company, a private sector DOGE.”
  — Alex Shea, [29:25]

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Important Timestamps

• 01:27 – Introduction to DOGE and Trump’s second-term bureaucracy purge
• 02:41 – Alex Shea’s introduction and motives for attending Brown
• 04:29 – Shea’s conservative profile before Brown
• 05:48 – Spectator writer’s meeting: Fox News debate
• 07:06 – Tuition increases spark investigation into administrative bloat
• 09:21 – Web scraping/AI-driven survey targeting Brown’s staff
• 11:36 – Survey sent to nearly 4000 staff; university launches investigation
• 16:01-16:41 – Campus reacts: attention on spectacle, not policy
• 18:20 – Media snowball: national coverage and Elon Musk retweet
• 20:01 – University disciplinary hearing details
• 22:39 – Karim Zodi’s published critique (“Against Bloat at Brown”)
• 26:22 – Brown’s layoffs; debate over cause
• 28:25 – Assessment of campus impact
• 29:25 – Shea’s post-Brown tech startup
• 29:45 – Karim’s takeaways and law school plans

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Conclusion

Bloat@Brown traces how a self-styled campus crusader, inspired by federal anti-bureaucracy fervor and equipped with technology, attempts to hold a university accountable—but instead finds controversy, division among his peers, and a media spectacle that overshadows the substance. The episode critically examines not just campus politics, but the effectiveness (and ethics) of attention-grabbing activism in changing minds or policy. Ultimately, it’s a cautionary tale on how process and tactics can overwhelm issues, leaving more heat than light.

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Transcript

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[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

The early days of 2025 were dominated by coverage of the beginning of Donald Trump's second term and particularly the work of the Department of Government Efficiency, or doge. Within just days of inauguration, entire agencies were gutted, budgets slashed and programs halted. The underlying philosophy of DOGE is that public servants are wasteful and corrupt at best, incompetent at worst, malicious. This cynical view of government and bureaucratic inefficiency has been around for a long time, but it was center stage once again in the first months of 2025, and it didn't stay contained to our federal government. A student at Brown University was inspired to follow in Doge's footsteps by searching for waste in the administration of Brown University. In doing so, he he was subject to a student conduct investigation and mocked by some of his peers. But as he says it, time has vindicated him. I'm ian mont. This week on campus files bloat at brown doge comes to brown university.

[Alex Shea]

I liked many things about Brown, such as the fact that they have the open curriculum. They didn't force you to take classes that you didn't want to take That's Alex Shea.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

Alex arrived at Brown as a freshman in 2023, and he's pretty open about why he chose Brown.

[Alex Shea]

That's sort of the answer that you tell people if you don't want to seem like you only care about prestige. But the real reason is that Ivy League schools like Brown are shown to increase your earning prospects. Also, I'm a legacy to Brown, which I acknowledge, and so I probably had an unfair advantage compared to the median applicant. I also went to Andover, a pursue sporting school for high school, which is another unfair advantage compared to the median applicant. Employers trust these schools as gatekeepers of talent. And that's the real reason why I chose to go to Brown is because it's prestigious and I felt that it would help my career.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

As both a legacy and a graduate of an elite prep school. Alex was not a particularly unusual entrant at Brown, but going in, he already had a unique reputation in high school.

[Alex Shea]

I started writing a column for the Boston Globe when we had the landmark Supreme Court ruling Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

The case Alex is talking about effectively made race based affirmative action illegal in college admissions. The case was based on claims that affirmative action made it harder for students of Asian descent like Alex to get admission to college.

[Alex Shea]

And so I wrote a few columns about why I believe that was the correct ruling and why we shouldn't judge students by their race in deciding who to accept into colleges. I got invited to do a few Fox News interviews of that too, and some of these went viral. And these ended up in the group chats of all of the incoming freshman class at Brown. And so the moment that I stepped foot on campus at Brown, everybody who's already suspect about me.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

Alex brought existing connections to conservative organizations which gave him a unique opportunity.

[Alex Shea]

Donors reached out to me and they wanted me to restart sort of a libertarian conservative type publication at Brown. And these are sort of counterpoints to sort of the more traditional, as opposed to the Harvard Crimson or the Stanford Daily News. These sort of give an alternate perspective for these voices that are more marginalized because they're more right wings. And so I thought this was a cool idea.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

Alex was approached by the Fund for American Studies, a libertarian think tank, which among other things, provides funding for alternative media on college campuses. With this opportunity, Alex revived the Brown Spectator, a defunct conservative leaning student paper.

[Alex Shea]

I had known about the Brown Spectator for a while. I guess the history is that it was sort of this right wing alternative to the Brown Daily Herald, which is the biggest newspaper here. So the president of the Brown Republicans. Ben Marcus loved this idea as well, and we decided to work together. He was the editor in chief. I was a publisher, and we brought in people who were interested in being writers. And there was a good group of maybe about 20 people who liked the mission, and they wanted to write articles.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

A short while later, the Spectator held a writer's meeting to assign pieces for the first run of the paper.

[Karim Zodi]

In the writers meeting, he thought that the publication should try to be as provocative as possible. And he said, I think we should be the campus's Fox News.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

That's Karim Zodi. Kareem is from British Columbia, and like Alex, he also leans conservative. He came to Brown expecting to be challenged by a comparatively liberal student body. And he was excited to hear about the Brown Spectator because it was supposed to be a space for debate. But what he didn't love was the idea that the paper should think of itself like Fox News. And he told Alex as much.

[Karim Zodi]

He said, well, you know, Fox News is the most popular news source in America. Everyone watches it. It gets so much attention. And we want people to actually pay attention to what we're writing, not just to ignore it. I basically believed that you shouldn't really pursue notoriety at all costs because, like, the Fox News approach on campus would just lead to liberal people making fun of the publication or being offended by it and not engaging with the ideas that might have been presented in it. And Alex didn't seem to be concerned by that. He seemed to define the success of the publication simply by how much attention it could get.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

In the same meeting, Alex talked about the fact that Brown was raising tuition by about 5%, so that the total cost of attendance would be about $97,000 a year.

[Alex Shea]

We were discussing, like, when is this going to become six figures for a year of college tuition? I mean, at this current rate, like, soon, by the end of the decade. And so we were discussing what people would write about, and I was like, I'm going to write about this. I'm going to do some research on this.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

Rising tuition is a problem. Across the country, from community college to Ivy League, the real causes of rising tuition are debated and complex. One leading theory argues that schools charge basically as much as they can expect to receive from either student or. Or federal loans, and that increases in federal loan funding incentivize schools to raise tuition. Basically, from the school's perspective, if the money is available, why not take it? But straight from the jump, Alex had a different cause. In administrative bloat.

[Alex Shea]

I was actually inspired by a Brown Alum who my dad knew personally when they went to Brown. Andrew Yang, the class of 96. I believe he ran for president as a Democrat in 2020. And around then, during his presidential campaign, he released a book called the War on Normal People. But among other things, he also talks about problems with the educational system. And then he was the one who introduced it to me because he also pointed out this concept of administrative bloat as being responsible for increasing the cost of tuition.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

Basically, the idea is that over time, more and more administrators are hired for unnecessary roles, raising costs and ultimately requiring increases in tuition. Karim remembers Alex describing this idea in the writers meeting.

[Karim Zodi]

The impression that I got from Alex, based off the things that he said, was even if he couldn't get any specific information about administrative bloat or he couldn't make any real investigation work, I got the impression that Alex was going to write a fiery article criticizing it. I think we discussed him potentially interviewing people and he kind of implied that he would do it in a kind of antagonistic way. And me and some other people in the publications thought that was a bad idea. In general, his approach seemed to be, let's attack these people that I disagree with ideologically.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

But Alex also had another strategy in mind. He was studying computer science and thought he could bring some of those skills into the project.

[Alex Shea]

And so I thought we could apply some technical leverage to this by performing web scraping on contact databases. And we were. And so we were able to find all the administrators and their email addresses and put together sort of this investigative project. I really wanted to do a survey. And I guess Elon Musk and the federal government with Doge took a similar

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

approach just a couple weeks earlier. In late February of 2025, Elon Musk directed the federal government to email federal workers asking them to describe the work they did over the last week. Musk stated that a failure to respond would be taken as a resignation.

[Alex Shea]

I guess it was an important question to understand what all these people do is because from their titles it's often vague.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

So Alex began his project by using basic web scraping tools to compile a list of staff at Brown University from the university's internal HR and finance system. Now, it's important to note that there are two main kinds of employees at a university. Staff and faculty. To oversimplify, faculty are people who teach. Staff are basically everyone else. Alex is only concerned with staff. So Alex now had a list of 3,805 staff members at Brown. He then fed that list into an AI model which he said would assess each person on three criteria.

[Alex Shea]

So it was to flag several things. There was the DEI category. We wanted to flag categories that might involve dei. The other one was redundancy, where we were seeing if there were too many people doing the same thing. The last category was called Bullshit Jobs.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

I should also say Alex uses the term we to describe his work on this project, but it's important to note that he's doing this work on his own. The staff of the Spectator know that Alex is working on some sort of project on tuition costs, but they don't know exactly what he's doing, nor are they assisting in the work.

[Alex Shea]

We asked several questions, one of what is like what are your daily tasks? Or something to that effect. We asked something about how would Brown students be impacted if your job was removed? We asked them to comment on sort of the AI generated rating that we had created as well.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

With all this data in hand, Alex sent the survey in the middle of the night to avoid being flagged by university. It A few responses began trickling in, but by 10am Brown University ordered all staff to ignore the survey. But word still got around quickly and in short order, Brown had launched a student conduct investigation into Alex. So Alex thinks if Brown is scrambling to cover this up, then he must be onto something.

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[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

Early on a Tuesday morning in March 2025, Alex Shea sent an email to 3805 staff members at Brown asking them to justify their jobs. Karim, a fellow staff writer for the Brown Spectator, learned about the survey for the first time that that same morning

[Karim Zodi]

I found it funny. Initially, I thought it was funny because of the scale of the thing and how kind of audacious it was. It's kind of shocking, so I found it funny. But then kind of reflecting a bit more on it and seeing the reaction, I pretty quickly started to think that this was a mistake.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

To Kareem, part of the mistake was the scale. See, staff includes more than just upper administration. It includes dining staff, custodial and maintenance staff, people whose roles are clearly essential to any university.

[Karim Zodi]

It wasn't like a detailed survey about the specifics of these people's employment. It was kind of like a can you please respond to this rating that I've calculated and explain why it's accurate or inaccurate? And it went out to, from what I can tell, literally everyone that he could find online that was employed by Brown.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

And to make matters more complicated, the staff at the Brown Spectator were learning of what Alex had done at the same time as the campus and the public.

[Karim Zodi]

It came as a shock to me and pretty much everyone else on the publication when it dropped. Alex made a website and he published the website and sent all the emails. I believe that he didn't discuss it with his other members of the leadership team, and that frustrated them because their name was tied to the Spectator, too, and they wanted to know what was happening before it happened. And they didn't.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

But in Alex's eyes, he was accomplishing his goal, which was all that mattered.

[Alex Shea]

There is just a huge reaction on campus on Tuesday. Everybody's talking about it on Side Chat, which is the anonymous messaging app. It spills over onto Twitter and bluesky. This really got people talking, which I guess I was happy about.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

But Kareem's recollection was a bit different

[Karim Zodi]

than Alex's in the dining hall. I think in the days following that, I would hear people. I on one occasion I heard somebody talking about this so did you hear about that kid that sent all those emails? And the sentiment that I was gathering on campus was that, yeah, everybody was kind of uniformly against what happened. They would say, yeah, that guy, you know, he was such an idiot. Like, that's so stupid. I can't believe he did that. So, yeah, it was a big deal on campus. A lot of people were talking about it, but it wasn't like anybody was talking about the issue of administrative bloats. People were just talking about the spectacle of what he'd done.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

The story had spread well beyond the bounds of campus. Alex was now getting messages from reporters looking to cover his project.

[Alex Shea]

I believe the first reporter was from the Chronicle of Higher Education. And I did an interview with her. The article hadn't run yet, and I got a notice from Student Conduct. And they informed me that I was under a preliminary investigation for a myriad of charges that sounded ridiculous. Initial things that they were investigating me for were emotional psychological harm, invasion of privacy, misrepresentation, because they said that I misrepresented myself as a journalist or the Brown Spectator because I wasn't actually a journalist, they said, and violation of the technology policy.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

Brown University was not taking Alex's project lightly. They were considering four charges against him. Specifically, the charges were that Alex misrepresented himself as a reporter for the Spectator, which was at the time not a recognized student organization. That Alex violated campus policy by accessing confidential university data from internal HR systems and then sharing it publicly. And finally, that Alex had inflicted emotional harm on some staff by publicly labeling them or their positions as either harmful or illegal. But by starting this investigation, Brown gave Alex some very valuable ammunition. Here's Kareem.

[Karim Zodi]

I thought Brown's response was a bit heavy handed, and I didn't really agree with it. And I say that partially because it really played into Alex's hands. I got the impression that he, he was able to use this to his advantage to kind of get more attention.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

Alex did exactly that.

[Alex Shea]

More reporters started reaching out. Then there was a Newsweek article. There was an article in the, in the New York sun, in the Washington Times. And then Pirate Wires, sort of, which is this tech blog, reached out to me and they wanted me to write a blog post on the Tuesday, two weeks after sent out the email. And Elon Musk himself retweets this article that I read for Pirate Wires. And because he has so many followers, then it gets really big. Then there are TV segments about this, articles in every publication you could think of.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

The post Alex wrote for Pirate Wires was titled I used AI to email 3800 Ivy League bureaucrats. Now my school is investigating me. Musk retweeted the article with the caption wow. A post which received 7.5 million views. Alex also contacted the foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, also known as Fire. Fire quickly helped him formulate a response to the investigation. After the initial flurry of press and investigations, things quieted down

[Alex Shea]

and then it died down for a bit because so far this is just an investigation. And then I guess maybe this is a month out. Now Brown decides that they're formally charging me with misrepresenting myself as a journalist and violating the technology policy.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

These pared down charges would be tried before an administrative review meeting where a university employee would act almost like a judge ruling on Alex's guilt. But shortly before the hearing, Alex received word that one of the charges had been dropped. Alex was no longer being charged with misrepresenting himself as a journalist, but he is still being charged with scraping data from private university systems and making it public. Finally, the day of Alex's hearing arrives.

[Alex Shea]

Like it would strike you as something where there's not a lot of due process. Like you're not allowed to bring an attorney into the room. You're not even allowed to have like a faculty advisor presence. None of these protections are afforded. You're not allowed to cross examine the deans. And essentially the way that it's set up, though to their credit, is that there's a neutral arbitrator who initially was actually an administrator, but I was successfully able to get the administrative removed for a conflict of interest and replaced a professor because again, this was an email of targeting administrators, not professors.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

Sometime later, a decision is reached, the

[Alex Shea]

charges go away, and there's a new round of media articles after that saying that this is the correct decision.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

But through all of this, others on the Spectator, like Karim, were being more vocal in disagreeing with Alex. Karim even decided he's going to use the Spectator itself to call out the problems with Alex's work.

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[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

After all the charges were cleared, Alex felt he'd proven his point. As he tells it, Brown had failed to successfully prosecute him for calling out waste at the university, and he kick started a conversation both on and off campus about administrative bloat. And all the while the Brown Spectator, the newly restarted paper, was set to publish its first full run. Karim had written a piece about graffiti on campus, but then at the last minute he decided to scrap that piece and write about Alex instead.

[Karim Zodi]

The argument that I wanted to make was that Alex took a reasonable issue to be concerned with the idea of administrative blows and even criticizing dei, I think is reasonable. But he approached it in an unreasonable manner and in a manner that undermined any kind of productive engagement that he could have had with people that maybe disagreed with him, or any attempt at actually unearthing newsworthy information, because he didn't do either. He didn't have a productive conversation with anyone, in my view, and he didn't uncover anything that was worthy of note. All he did was get attention for himself, which I think is maybe, from his own perspective, worthwhile. But that doesn't do anything to advance the issues that he was supposedly most concerned with.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

I asked Karim to tell me what specifically he had in mind with these critiques of Alex. One critique was Alex's use of AI models, which are known to often hallucinate information and tend to thoughtlessly adopt and regurgitate the viewpoints of the person using them. Imagine if instead, Alex had presented the same data to the model and asked the model to describe how valuable each person is to the university. Another point of contention for Kareem was how Alex handled the survey.

[Karim Zodi]

Clearly, if you're interested in getting responses like genuine responses from people, it doesn't make sense to assign them a rating that you predetermined that their job isn't meaningfully important and kind of imply that they should be laid off and then ask them to defend themselves. I don't think any reasonable person should think that they're going to get productive responses with that sort of approach.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

And finally, there's Alex's approach towards DEI on campus. Earlier, you heard Alex talk about his views on affirmative action, which he thinks is a misguided way to address racial disparity in college admissions. He feels similarly about so called DEI programs.

[Alex Shea]

I identify myself as a libertarian, so I'm somebody who believes in financial efficiency, in equality. And so I oppose things like affirmative action and DEI because I feel like these concepts are also things that go against the concept of meritocracy.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

Alex also justifies his anti DEI position by pointing to executive orders from the Trump administration which intend to make DEI illegal in federal programs. But Karim felt the way Alex went about this was misguided and inconsistent.

[Karim Zodi]

The kinds of DEI that Alex was flagging weren't the kinds of DEI that I think he should have been worried about. So he was flagging people on campus that were responsible for coordinating affinity groups on campus, and they organize events for these various groups. Interestingly, I don't think he flagged the Hillel or like the Brown Jewish center, because I don't see why he wouldn't. That's also another affinity group. But there's nothing about those that has anything to do with affirmative action, for example, which is, I think, the actual issue.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

So Karim wrote a new piece for the first issue of the Spectator, titled Against Bloat at Brown. In it, he argues that both Alex and Bloat at Brown failed in their objective of starting a conversation because the way Alex went about it put all the attention on him. Karim contacted Alex while writing the piece and asked if he wanted to comment. Alex didn't respond, but he did read the piece when it was published.

[Alex Shea]

I guess I disagree with the substance of it. I think he describes it as needlessly provocative, or I think we're just starting an important conversation to be had. It led to people caring about this issue. It ultimately led to layoffs, which are addressing this budget deficit that we're having. And so I think in retrospect, it completely was the right move and it was productive and it achieved the desired results. And so I think his analysis on this is just wrong.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

You may have caught Alex mentioning layoffs there. In September of 2025, Brown announced it would lay off 48 employees and eliminate 55 unfilled job openings in an effort at cost savings.

[Alex Shea]

I view this as vindication because I think this is the correct thing to do. This is what I've been advocating all along. They tried to demonize me and say that I was wrong and that they needed all these administrators. But I guess the truth has come out and that the school will function fine with 103 positions gone.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

While Alex is claiming victory, Brown University says otherwise. In a statement to Campus Files, a Brown spokesperson called these claims entirely fictional and said the cuts were due to expected declines in federal research funding, the persisting threat of deep cuts to indirect cost reimbursement for research grants to higher education, and other federal policy changes that will affect tuition revenue. Karim also pointed to federal cuts as the cause.

[Karim Zodi]

First of all, the obvious and I think better explanation for all of this is the fact that Brown has had to pay a massive fine to the Trump administration.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

Brown has agreed to pay $50 million over the course of 10 years in order to restore access to federal research funding. Brown also settled a case accusing the university of illegally coordinating with other universities to fix prices. Brown is paying an estimated $19.5 million settlement for that case as well. And as for Brown's general financial state, they have carried a deficit for much of the last decade. Some portions of that may be due to administrative staff, but compared to similar schools and stronger financial positions, Brown spends only a little above average. In fact, Brown's total revenue is one and a half billion dollars. For an institution that big, it's a bit of a hard sell to say a few extra staff positions are to blame for increasing tuition and layoffs. How, if at all, did what Alex did with Blowett at Brown have an impact on campus?

[Karim Zodi]

Yeah, I don't think it changed anyone's mind. It didn't take any liberal person that was in favor of DEI on campus and not concerned with the issue of administrative bloat and make them against DEI and concerned with the issue of administrative bloat. I think it further put people off the kind of conservative sphere online. Alex really closely associated himself with that. Like he went on Charlie Kirk and he went on Fox News and this sort of thing. So I think people would see that and think that that was cringe. So I don't think it changed much on campus.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

One can certainly argue about the impact or success of Alex's projects at Brown, but there's no doubt he's turned the project into a success for himself. By the end of the school year, Alex had decided to drop out of Brown. He applied for a job at Palantir, the developer of mass surveillance technology, and had received an offer. And after a few months there, he left to start a new company, capitalizing on the attention he gained at Brown.

[Alex Shea]

We just found $250 million in fraudulent government spending over the past month, but that's nothing compared to nearly $500 billion that happen every year. And that's why we raised $5.1 million to start the anti fraud company, a private sector doge that saves your tax dollars from greedy corporations.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

As for Kareem, he's applying to law school and actually wrote about Bloat at Brown in his personal application. He also told me that after attending Brown, he's much more understanding of people with differing views, particularly the arguments of both socialists and communists. He still identifies as conservative. If you've got a story idea, we would love to hear about it. Send us an [e-mail] and if you're loving this podcast, be sure to click Follow on your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. While you're there, leave us a review and a five star rating. Campus Files is an Odyssey original podcast hosted by Margo Gray and Ian Mont. Our executive producers are Leah Rees Dennis and Lloyd Lockridge. Campus Files is produced by Ian Mont and Margot Gray, Sound design and engineering by Andy Jaskowicz and Zach Clark Legal support by Laura Berman and Melissa Jean Original music by Davy Sumner Special thanks to Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Hilary Schuff, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchison, Rose, Sean Cherry, Curt Courtney and Lauren Vieira.

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[Lloyd Lockridge]

So I've been interested in it for so long that I can't remember when it started.

[Alex Shea]

But all I can tell you, like in childhood.

[Lloyd Lockridge]

Childhood?

[Podcast Host / Advertiser]

Did you do the DNA test?

[Lloyd Lockridge]

I've not done that. I wasn't all that interested in the statistical breakdown of my DNA. I'm more interested in the stories.

[Alex Shea]

The stories of your ancestors, my ancestors,

[Lloyd Lockridge]

and the circumstances that moved them around the planet. Every family has its stories. Your grandparents met on a blind date or your great grandmother passed through Ellis Island. But every once in a while you'll hear something a little more unusual.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

I have a really vague memory of somebody saying did you know your great uncle killed somebody?

[Alex Shea]

I've heard my whole life that she invented the margarita.

[Advertiser / Guest Speaker]

He gets a patent one month before the Wright Brothers.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

Oh, my God.

[Lloyd Lockridge]

Some of these stories are hard to believe. Others are hard to imagine. And as these tall tales get passed down through the generations, they become something more than a family story. They become family lore. My name is Lloyd Lockridge, and in this podcast, I'm going to have people on to tell stories about their families. And then we're going to investigate those stories and find out how much of it is true.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

To go into the archive and find what you think is, like, not just the secret of your family's life, but

[Karim Zodi]

the explanatory secret of your family's life. Wow. You know, maybe this old family story that I overheard in my grandmother's kitchen is true.

[Lloyd Lockridge]

This is Family Lore, a new series from Odyssey Podcasts.

[Narrator / Reporter (Ian Mont)]

You're always wondering why your dad is a certain way.

[Karim Zodi]

Well, here's one answer I love when

[Advertiser / Guest Speaker]

I hear somebody says I have a boring family history. They didn't do anything. I say it's because you don't know anything about your history.

[Lloyd Lockridge]

Please follow and listen to family lore on any of your podcast apps.