Because I’m going to be quite critical of Theo Baker’s How to Rule the World, it feels only right to start with three pieces of sincere praise: the book held my attention all the way to the end, I learned things from it, and I read it twice. These are not reactions I expect most new books to generate, let alone one written by someone not yet of legal drinking age. Hence on this basis alone, I would have to concede that Rule (borrowing Baker’s shorthand for a “secret” Stanford class, about which more below) is a real achievement.

The book is a college memoir of sorts, in the tradition of Ross Douthat’s Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (2005). Baker is adamant that, unlike Natalie Krinsky’s Chloe Does Yale (2005) or even F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920), “this is no roman à clef”; he insists that everything he reports happened as written. Still, though the genre may be familiar, Rule is unusual in that it covers only one academic year, the author’s freshman sojourn at Stanford University. That particular year—2022-23—was eventful, for Baker and Stanford alike. To cut to the chase, as a student journalist for the Stanford Daily, Baker managed to bring down the president of arguably the world’s most prestigious, influential, and richest university (even if the defenestrated ex-boss remains a tenured professor in the Biology Department). Baker is quick to acknowledge that he didn’t pull this off all by himself, but if Rule is to be believed—and I have no reason to suspect otherwise—the announcement of Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation on July 19, 2023 wouldn’t have happened without him.

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How to Rule the World is really two books: a journalistic procedural à la All the President’s Men, and Baker’s account of “the Stanford inside Stanford,” his—to my ear, rather memorable—phrase for the secretive network of clubs and classes that separate “ordinary” Stanford students (if any can be called such) from the “10xers,” “builders,” and “high-agency” Übermenschen who constitute no more than ten, perhaps not even five, percent of the student body. The procedural gobbles up more and more pages as Rule progresses, but the inner Stanford is the more interesting topic. Baker has done a real service in shining a light into corners rarely, if ever, illuminated for outsiders.

The connection between the book’s two themes is not merely that both defined Baker’s freshman year, but what the “MTL” resignation over falsifying research data says about Stanford and elite academia more broadly. In both his investigation of the former president and his experience of the secret Stanford, Baker finds corner-cutting, conflicts of interest, ethical lapses, mendacity (up to and including outright lying), stonewalling, logrolling, cover-ups, and much dismal else: all is not well in the ivory tower. Rule does not, to say the least, whitewash Stanford. Baker is forthright about the university’s many recent failures: famous ones such as Theranos and FTX that resulted in jail time, but also lesser-known malfeasance such as a professor’s $29 million payout to settle a fraud claim, a former dean’s affair with an undergraduate (though Baker omits that both were female and the dean was married to a man), and Stanford’s steadfast refusal ever to acknowledge anything. “Stanford is supposed to look perfect,” Baker intones.

I found How to Rule the World by chance. I spent most of fall 2024 in Berkeley researching my own (prospective) book on the modern university (among other things) and began the actual writing of it earlier this year. One morning wasting time on clickbait (procrastination being the bane of all writers), I happened across a review of Baker’s book. Now, had it been about any other school, I wouldn’t have bought it; I’ve read enough college books at this point to grok the essential points. But if you’re going to write about Cal (as alumni and sports fans call the University of California, Berkeley), you need to understand Stanford, its bitter cross-Bay rival, so I coughed up. I’m glad I did. Rule is helpful for understanding not only Stanford but our world more broadly, including the incubators that produce our elites.

Read the rest here.