Former Brown student pins security lapses on spending priorities after campus shooting

A former Brown University student and friend of Ella Cook says the Ivy League school's spending priorities contributed to lax security that allowed a lone gunman to enter and exit campus facilities before Cook's death earlier this month. In an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital, Alex Shieh said, 'I don't think it's particularly surprising that the old buildings on campus have never been retrofitted with updated security systems, because that's not what the priorities are with the spending, and that they know that people will want to come to Brown anyway, irrespective of the facilities, because of the Ivy League name.' He added, 'It is sort of confusing to people that you have a school that costs $100,000 a year, you have an $8 billion endowment. How come the building doesn't have cameras?'

Shieh, who served as publisher of Brown's student newspaper, the Brown Spectator, has long criticized what he calls bloated administrative spending at Brown. He says a campus-wide survey he circulated asking administrators to describe their jobs revealed a staffing level that he says has ballooned to about 4,000 administrators for roughly 11,000 students. Brown's response to his reporting included disciplinary action that the university later dropped, with officials arguing the move targeted conduct rather than substantive claims. Shieh contends the administration's spending choices -- including high compensation for an athletic director and an oversized administrative cadre -- crowd out facilities upgrades and student services. He remains a former member of Brown's College Republicans, and his reporting helped spark a House Judiciary Committee hearing in June on free speech concerns and spending at Ivy League schools, where he testified as a witness.

Shieh told Fox News Digital that the spending questions tied to campus security are part of a broader debate on how resources are allocated on campus and whether student safety is adequately funded. He described the university's approach as emblematic of a trend he says has driven tuition up nationwide and placed Brown's price tag at roughly $100,000 a year. The House Judiciary Committee hearing, held in June, focused on free-speech concerns and what lawmakers described as misallocation of resources at elite universities, with Shieh among the witnesses who voiced his criticisms.

The incident timeline: On Nov. 13, a masked man with a gun entered Brown's Barus and Holley Room 166 for ECON 0110: Principles of Economics, shouted something indiscernible and opened fire. Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov were killed, and nine others were wounded. The gunman then drove about 50 miles to Brookline, Massachusetts, where he killed MIT nuclear physicist Nuno Loureiro two days later, authorities said. The suspect, Claudio Neves-Valente, avoided capture for several days before his death from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage shed in Salem, New Hampshire, on Thursday night. Investigators credited a homeless man living on Brown's campus with providing an account that eventually led to the suspect. Officials say preventive technology and cameras in the affected facilities might have helped authorities intervene earlier, though no such assertion has been made about Brown's campus at this stage.

Brown University has not yet publicly attributed the killings to any policy decisions in its public statements; investigators say the cases underscore campus security challenges that cross Ivy League lines. The investigation is ongoing, and authorities continue to review campus safety measures amid wider debates about how universities spend their funds and how those decisions affect student and staff security.