Student activism at Brown University 
Around 2 a.m. on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, I launched a public database mapping all 3,805 non-faculty employees of Brown University and sent each one a simple email: What do you do all day?
Ostensibly, it was a journalistic inquiry. The site, which I named Bloat@Brown, was somewhere between FaceMash (Mark Zuckerberg’s college project that scraped student ID photos and let users rank who was hotter) and DOGE. But instead of using Zuckerberg’s ELO-style rankings — a numerical method originally developed for ranking chess players — my site, Bloat@Brown, used retrieval-augmented generation and a custom GPT-4o pipeline to rank administrators by their operational importance.
First, I scraped the internet — job boards, the student newspaper, LinkedIn — to gather whatever I could about each employee. I fed that data into GPT-4o mini to generate a rough utility ranking. The results weren’t definitive — there is only so much information on the public web — but they seemed directionally accurate. (Like obvious DEI jobs triggered a DEI filter, for instance.)
While my roommate slept, I worked from the common room in my dorm’s basement — the same room that floods whenever it rains and thus has plastic tarps, industrial fans, and wet floor signs permanently set up despite Brown’s tuition and fees rising to $93,064 a year. Brown’s financial woes also mean that the school runs a $46 million annual budget deficit while professors constantly complain they’re underpaid. So, where is our $93,064 a year actually going?
After doing some digging, I discovered that much of the money is being thrown into a pit of bureaucracy. The small army of 3,805 non-faculty administrators is more than double the faculty headcount, and makes for roughly one administrator for every two undergrads. In the US, the cost of college tuition has far outpaced inflation because, for one, administrative staff count has drastically outpaced growth in the student population — a cause for concern since, in the 20th century, universities were affordable and ran fine with a fraction of today’s staffers.