A student at Brown University is under investigation for the apparent crime of trying to find out how much dead weight is hiding inside the school’s massive administration.

Alex Shieh, a 20-year-old sophomore, sent the same simple question—“Describe what tasks you performed in the past week”—to all 3,805 administrators at the university. Brown’s response? Open an investigation into Shieh for causing “Emotional/Psychological Harm,” accusing him of misusing confidential data, and demanding he prove he deleted it. Shieh insists he never accessed anything private.

The irony is stunning. Brown gets around $254 million a year in federal funds and charges nearly $100,000 a year in tuition. But the moment a student tries to understand how that money is spent, the institution’s bureaucrats behave like they’ve been hit with a hostile cyberattack. Shieh launched a site called Bloat@Brown to post his findings. Not long after, the site was hacked from a university IP address, and he received an anonymous email containing his Social Security number—information that only certain Brown offices should even have access to.

In an article for Pirate Wires, Shieh said one administrator replied to his email with, “f*** you,” and another told him to “stick an entire cactus up [your] ass.” Brown then issued a memo telling employees not to respond.

Administrators are also accusing Shieh of misrepresenting himself as a reporter for The Brown Spectator, a libertarian campus paper that the university no longer officially recognizes. Shieh says he was motivated by rising costs and growing bloat at elite universities. His aim, he says, was to uncover redundancy, waste, and any legally questionable DEI-style jobs that might be in conflict with new federal guidelines.

Shieh told the Daily Caller, “It’s certainly not my goal to have Brown lose its federal funding. I would like it to be compliant… and also just to remove all these other administrative positions that… are just not necessary and also are bloating the bottom line.”

But Brown appears to be more concerned with silencing dissent. In a statement to the Daily Caller, a university spokesperson claimed the emails “improperly used data” and that the website launched alongside them contained “derogatory descriptions of job functions” for named staff. They insisted they couldn’t share more due to federal student privacy laws.

Translation: We can’t publicly defend our bloated bureaucracy, so we’ll just try to punish the guy who asked questions.

As for the cost to students? Brown continues to charge one of the highest tuitions in the country, with no sign that its vast—and apparently unaccountable—administrative machine is slowing down anytime soon.