HOW TO RULE THE WORLD

A cub reporter’s big exposé.

Baker was 17, a newcomer to Stanford’s student newspaper, when he got a tip about the university’s top boss. In this well-documented book, he describes the “full-time digging” that ensued, yielding a run of consequential articles. His reporting found “falsified” data in neuroscience studies authored by Marc Tessier-Lavigne before he became Stanford’s president. Tessier-Lavigne retracted several studies and was forced to resign. Baker’s step-by-step narrative is brisk and punctuated with well-explained details about sourcing, the particulars of data manipulation, and a scientific-publishing industry in which questionable findings often go uncorrected. His investigation dovetails with his broader look at “Stanford inside Stanford.” In this “exclusive world of excess and access,” tech companies and venture capitalists organize “highly exclusive” get-togethers and establish slush funds for “high-agency” students who learn, per one instructor, that “a great amount of value can be extracted from the people around you.” In such a milieu, some believe innovators can “supersede pesky, traditional rules.” Citing instances of corner-cutting and lawbreaking by university-affiliated power-players, he contends that Stanford “has made a Faustian bargain with Silicon Valley,” one that has enriched the school and faculty members but enabled “corruption.” Baker’s reporting earned him a Polk Award, the first time the prestigious journalism prize went to a college newspaper. As the son of prominent journalists, he encountered people who “assumed nepotism” helped him while reporting. “The reality was so much more mundane. I’d just worked, constantly.” Baker isn’t always discerning about the anecdotes he shares; some, foregrounding his moral compass, read like self-flattery. His pedestrian account of trying to preserve a long-distance relationship with his high-school girlfriend doesn’t add much either.

In this absorbing memoir, a college journalist reveals how his scoops brought down his august school’s leader.