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Charlie Kirk is the Founder and President of Turning Point USA, the largest and fastest growing conservative youth activist organization in the country with over 250,000 student members, over 150 full-time staff, and a presence on over 2,000 high school and college campuses nationwide. Charlie is also the Chairman of Students for Trump, which aims to activate one million new college voters on campuses in battleground states in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election. His social media reaches over 100 million people per month and according to Axios, he is one of the "top 10 most engaged" Twitter handles in the world. He is also the host of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” which regularly ranks among the top news shows on Apple podcast charts.
Charlie Kirk Interviews Brown Student Alex Shieh Who Exposed University Bureaucracy and DEI Bloat
Alex Shieh, a sophomore at Brown University, sent a simple email to 3,800 Brown staff members asking them to describe what tasks they performed in the past week. The response? About 20 replies, including one telling him to "f off." Shieh created a website called Bloat at Brown where he cataloged every employee at the school and used AI to rate their jobs in terms of necessity, redundancy, and what he calls BS jobs. Charlie Kirk sits down with Shieh to discuss his investigation into university bureaucracy, why Brown has over 4,400 employees but fewer than 1,000 are instructors, and how the university responded by launching a disciplinary investigation against him for simply asking questions as a student journalist.
Charlie Kirk opens the conversation by explaining what he believes is the fight of the 21st century: the battle against bureaucracy. Not just government bureaucracy, but bureaucracy in general. He compares it to how middle-aged men develop an intractable beer belly—organizations like governments, churches, charities, companies, and especially colleges develop layers of middle management, job justification, paper shuffling, and desk workers. The term bureaucrat literally means desk worker from its original French.
Kirk explains that DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) exists to try to eliminate this bureaucracy, and the question "What do you do here?" might be the most effective weapon against bloat he has seen.
Meet Alex Shieh: The Brown Student Who Asked Questions
Alex Shieh is a sophomore at Brown University, class of 2027, working as both a software engineer and journalist. He decided to email 3,800 Brown staff members with a very simple question: describe what tasks you performed in the past week. Shieh received about 20 responses to his email, including one that simply said "f off."
Shieh created a website called Bloat at Brown where he listed every employee at the school and used AI to rate their jobs in terms of necessity, redundancy, and what he calls BS jobs. He pointed out that Brown still has dozens, if not hundreds, of obvious DEI jobs in direct defiance of President Trump's executive order. Kirk poses the question: Why should Brown keep receiving taxpayer money?
As Kirk points out, Alex Shieh is a customer. He pays a tremendous amount of money for Brown to educate him. But when he starts asking the people he employs, "What do you do here?" he gets reprimanded.
The Economics of Brown University
When Alex Shieh joins the conversation, he explains that about three weeks prior, he sent an email to all of Brown's administrators. It was essentially a press request in his capacity as a journalist for the Brown Spectator, trying to get a read on what's going on at Brown University and what all these people are doing.
The timing was particularly interesting because just days after his email, the Trump administration announced they would take away Brown's federal funding because of DEI and anti-Semitism issues. But Shieh's investigation started before that announcement.
The numbers are staggering: Brown costs $93,000 a year for one year of college. Where does all this money go? Shieh discovered 3,850 non-faculty staff members. These are not professors teaching classes. These are people who sit at desks, push around papers, and nobody exactly knows what they do because they won't tell him.
The Shocking Staff-to-Faculty Ratio
Brown employs more than 4,400 employees, but fewer than 1,000 are instructors of any kind. That means 75% of jobs at Brown are not instructors. Kirk emphasizes this point for the radio audience—at Brown, only about a quarter of employees actually teach students.
Examples of Bureaucratic Bloat
Shieh provides specific examples of the bloat he discovered. At the Bloat at Brown website, they have identified about 49 people dedicated to DEI roles. These are the positions that just cost Brown $510 million from the Trump administration because they're refusing to comply with directives about DEI.
But the examples go beyond DEI:
Multiple people dedicated to ad sales for the alumni magazine—Shieh didn't even know the alumni magazine ran ads
About seven full-time people work on the alumni magazine in general, but they make freelancers and students write the actual articles
Numerous offices that exist behind the scenes that don't interact with students at all
Shieh points out that these bloated offices are raising the cost of tuition. The Ivy League is supposed to be an economic ladder where poor kids can attend and turn out successful in life, but that promise is being tested by this enormous price tag and complete disregard for financial planning.
The Five Categories of BS Jobs
Kirk asks Shieh to explain the five categories he uses to organize these positions. Interestingly, Shieh notes that these categories weren't created by a conservative—they were developed by David Graeber, an anthropologist and left anarchist. This suggests the issue of bureaucratic bloat should be apolitical, something people at both ends of the political spectrum should recognize.
The five categories are:
Flunkies: People like administrative assistants for mid-level bureaucrats. Why do all these mid-level bureaucrats need assistants? Are they really that busy? Graeber suggests the bureaucrats might just be there to make them feel more important.
Goons: Those who fight people on behalf of the university, deceive people—essentially everybody in the communications office. Shieh specifically mentions the Brown spokesperson has been putting out misinformation about him in the press, claiming the site uses confidential information, which isn't true.
Duct Tapers: People like IT staff dedicated to maintaining and upkeep of various data systems. At Brown, the Wi-Fi goes out all the time and IT systems aren't great. Instead of having an end-to-end solution with well-designed systems, they have a whole lot of IT staff sitting around fixing things when they break, duct taping problems instead of designing systems well in the first place.
Box Tickers: Essentially compliance officers and DEI officers who go around checking boxes to see if you're doing this or that. They don't really add value—they're just making sure everybody else toes the line.
Taskmasters: Mid-level administrators who boss around lower-level administrators and give them tasks. Maybe they're writing memos or drafting strategic action plans. How this benefits students is unclear, but they think they are very important.
Kirk emphasizes this distillation: when you send your kid to college at Brown, 4,400 employees work there, 1,000 of them are instructors of any kind (and that's being generous because it includes teaching assistants). That means 3,400 people are either flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, or taskmasters for $93,000 a year.
A Call for a Movement
Kirk sees this as more than just one student's project. He calls for others to replicate this at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford. Students should start mass emailing entire faculty databases saying, "I go to school here and I pay $100,000 a year. What did you accomplish last week?" They should organize the entire faculty database at their schools to justify why these positions exist.
Kirk announces he will push Linda McMahon and the Trump administration to demand this information as well. The question "What do you do here?" should be asked of everyone, organized into those five categories.
Kirk particularly loves this because when high-IQ driven young patriots like Shieh get disagreeable against power, institutions don't know how to deal with it.
Brown's Disciplinary Response
Kirk asks how the university responded to Shieh for simply being a customer asking questions about what he's paying for.
The situation has been reported widely, and Shieh is now backed by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), which put out a blog post outlining the entire situation. According to FIRE, Brown is pursuing a preliminary review against Shieh for four different charges:
Emotional and psychological harm
Violation of operational rules
Misrepresentation—because he said he's a reporter for the Brown Spectator, which isn't recognized by the student activities office, they claim this is misrepresentation
Invasion of privacy—for publishing people's names and job titles that Brown itself publishes on the internet
Shieh points out that Rhode Island has a state law called the Student Journalist Freedom of Expression Act which protects student journalism like his case.
Double Standards at Brown
Shieh highlights what he sees as clear double standards at Brown. He reveals that Charlie Kirk himself is banned from Brown University's campus. This happened because of an incident a few years ago where Brown told Kirk he couldn't film. Kirk came to campus and wasn't filming, compliant with all the rules, but some other students were filming him and those videos got posted online. That was deemed a violation of Brown's filming policy, resulting in Kirk's ban.
But consider what Brown has done with pro-Palestinian protesters:
In 2023, about 30 protesters trespassed in an administrative building. What Shieh is doing is speech; what they did was trespassing. They actually got arrested and charged, but Brown decided to drop the charges because they didn't want to inflame tensions.
When there was an encampment, the people involved struck a deal with the Brown administration that they wouldn't be held to normal disciplinary proceedings and that expulsion and suspension would be off the table for all of them.
Shieh argues this shows a clear double standard about how people are treated. For himself and Charlie Kirk, it's just speech and freedom of speech. But when people engage in disruptive actions and break actual laws, as long as they're on the left, they're protected.
Kirk summarizes the absurdity: if instead of asking the people you employ what they do all day, you hosted a Students for Justice in Palestine encampment in the middle of Brown's campus, that would be perfectly fine and they would settle with you. But asking bloated bureaucrats—the duct tapers and box tickers you employ—what they do all day subjects you to a disciplinary investigation.
How to Characterize Brown University
In the final moments, Kirk asks Shieh how he would describe Brown to the country after this experience.
Shieh's answer: "I think it's elitist."
He elaborates that Brown comes after people who espouse more right-leaning views, libertarians and conservatives. They don't come after the far-left or pro-Palestine people who are breaking actual rules. And consider the price tag: $93,000 a year. Financial aid isn't going to cut it for a lot of people, so people just can't go to Brown.
This is elitism plain and simple. They only want to be accessible to people on the coast who can afford this price tag and have those trendy, progressive elite perspectives. If you think DEI is bad, or if you just want to criticize the bloat, that's not acceptable at a place like Brown University.
Final Thoughts
Kirk tells Shieh he's a good man who will succeed in whatever he wants to do. He offers to write him a letter of recommendation if he ever wants to work for the real DOGE, saying they need super geniuses and hyper-patriots like him who can ask the right questions.
Kirk repeats his hope that students will create similar initiatives—micro-DOGEs—at Cornell, Columbia, Dartmouth, and every single major Ivy League school and university in the country. He expresses his hope that Brown will have to go through what he calls a "transformational process."
