Channeling DOGE, a Brown U. Student Asked Administrators: What Do You Do All Day?
Alex Shieh thought the ask was simple enough: In so many words, justify your job. Last week, the Brown University sophomore emailed the more than 3,500 administrators and staff members who work for his institution, requesting that they explain “how Brown students would be impacted if your position was eliminated.”
Shieh started working on Bloat@Brown. According to Shieh, he developed an algorithm that scraped online information about Brown’s employees from sources like LinkedIn, job postings, and news articles. That information was plugged into OpenAI’s GPT-4o minimodel, which then assessed each employee based on three categories. In addition to “legality” and “redundancy,” there’s an even less polite criterion: “bullshit job.”
It’s based on Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, a provocative book written by the late anthropologist David Graeber. In it, Graeber argues that a huge amount of work completed today is essentially pointless. He classifies those positions into five categories: duct-tapers, box-tickers, taskmasters, goons, and flunkies. Though Graeber’s politics don’t match Shieh’s — the scholar was an anarchist who helped organize the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the student is a libertarian — Shieh thought Graeber’s designations were illuminating, and incorporated them into his analysis at another student’s suggestion.