Molière Celebration is awarded to Brown University sophomore Alex Shieh for his unprecedented research into what university employees do all day.
Keying off the DOGE exercise in rooting out fraud, waste, and abuse in the federal government, Alex Shieh conducted an informal inquiry into the activities of the non-faculty employees at Brown U.
According to reports, he posed his survey questions as a journalist, with no mandatory requirements for responses — thereby setting off a firestorm of protests from university employees and administration alike.
How dare a mere student, with no more legitimate interest than seeking facts about how his $93,000 annual tuition (not a typo) is spent, pose such an impertinent question!?!
The “wise heads” at Brown threatened him with disciplinary action for his curiosity. And well they should be concerned about the facts being collected and even distributed to the public!
Maybe he would have gotten better treatment if he had reduced his findings to a brief report and sent it via SIGNAL to his journalist colleagues — including Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic! Whose head would explode then?
The Molière Celebration team would like to encourage Alex’s kind of inquisitiveness and the resulting light-shedding on how vast funds are spent by Brown and its Ivy League cabal.
Yes, there’s no doubt that they are PRIVATE institutions, and they can raise tuition and bloat the ranks of non-educational employees at will. Just because it’s legal doesn’t make it right.
We hope that the squawkers at Brown will take to heart the purpose and result of Alex Shieh’s survey, and that he will find a useful summer internship at a relevant place like the DOGE.
Congratulations, Alex Shieh, for earning the coveted Molière Celebration!