Move over, leftist college kids who’ve been beaten, arrested, and threatened with deportation. The New York Times is here to tell you that the real persecuted students are vocal conservatives whose schools decline to discipline them for douchey behavior.

On Wednesday, the paper ran a non-story by reporter Jeremy Peters about the “plight” of Brown University student Alex Shieh, who actually testified before Congress on Wednesday. The headline reads, “A Student at Brown Channeled Elon Musk. Then He Got in Trouble,” while the subhead explains, “A conservative student newspaper had DOGE-style questions about the work of Brown University staff. Its writers were summoned to disciplinary hearings.”

Whoa, that actually sounds bad. As dumb and destructive as Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” has been, certainly, college students are entitled to ask questions about how their schools operate. So what did the sophomore and his conservative student newspaper do? Run unflattering columns about the university’s administrative bloat? Ask uncomfortable questions about where their astronomically high tuition is going? Demand the school president’s resignation?

No. Actually, the conservative student newspaper in question, The Brown Spectator, has yet to run a single issue. What happened instead is that Shieh, who created a database featuring Brown employees’ names and titles, emailed 3,805 university workers to give them The Bobs treatment from Office Space by telling them to justify their jobs:

Hi

I’m a reporter with The Brown Spectator working on a story about Brown’s administration. We’ve published Brown’s org chart as an online database and run an algorithm on all administrators to analyze administrative efficiency. You can view your results here: https://bloat.brownspectator.com/person

We want to hear your side of the story to paint a fuller picture of your role at Brown. Could you please (1) explain your role, (2) describe what tasks you performed in the past week, (3) explain how Brown students would be impacted if your position was eliminated, and (4) comment on your current rating in our database and any areas of concern raised by the algorithm?

We will update our database and ratings when we hear back from you.

Please reply within one week.

Best,

Alex Shieh

Peters, who did not include the text of the email in his piece, described Shieh’s message and the school’s reaction to it as “the latest flashpoint in the free speech wars on American college campuses.”

Let’s be clear. Shieh’s email is, to put it mildly, obnoxious. Moreover, he did not just send it to a handful of employees or workers in a particular department, which still would have been douchey but on a smaller scale. Had he done so, we all may have been spared this Times article. But no, he emailed 3,805 people to demand they justify their livelihoods to him “within one week.”

So yeah, that’s the kind of “free speech” that will inevitably elicit a “What the fuck is this?” from the higher ups at an institution, which in this case rightly looked into the matter before rightly declining to discipline Shieh and two other students involved over potential violations of the student code of conduct, “including its prohibitions on invasion of privacy, misrepresentation and emotional or psychological harm.”

It’s worth noting that Peters did not include perspectives from people who received Shieh’s email. The only other person the reporter quotes – beyond a Brown spokesperson spouting boilerplate – is an economics professor sympathetic to Shieh’s aims.

One would think that, given the fact that the Trump administration is waging an ongoing war against Brown and higher education in general, the Times would put these kinds of oppressed-campus-conservatives stories that The Free Press runs all the time on the back burner, particularly when the conservative wasn’t disciplined. Of course, one would be wrong.