How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University

Arriving at Stanford in September 2022, Baker joins the Structured Liberal Education (SLE) program, a Great Books-style curriculum. He soon discovers that the university has implemented a highly bureaucratic crackdown on campus social life, which students have dubbed the “War on Fun” (20). To host any social gathering, students must navigate a multi-departmental Party Review Committee, submit an extensive “Harm Reduction Plan” (20), and even pass an exam to be eligible to apply.

Motivated by the memory of his recently deceased grandfather, Steve Glasser, who had worked on his own college newspaper, Baker joins The Stanford Daily. He decides to make the War on Fun his first story but struggles to find sources, as students and staff fear administrative retaliation if they’re quoted criticizing the university. To get material, he attends his first college party—a fraternity’s “White Lies” themed event—for the sole purpose of reporting. His investigation reveals that the university’s restrictive alcohol policies are counterproductive, driving students to binge drink in secret and causing a rise in alcohol-related hospitalizations. After Baker contacts the university for comment, the director of the alcohol policy office warns employees not to speak with him. The resulting article becomes the most-read story of the year for The Daily, and the university’s tree mascot is suspended for staging a protest in support of the cause.

Feeling pressure to prove his technical skills during his first quarter at Stanford, Baker enrolls in CS107, a notoriously difficult class for computer science majors designed to weed out weak performers. While working at The Stanford Daily newsroom, he receives a tip about William Curry, a young man who was caught living in a freshman dorm while pretending to be a student. Baker’s initial reporting reveals that Curry was a charismatic impostor who had successfully integrated into the dorm community for several weeks.

A follow-up investigation uncovers a much larger story: Curry had begun spreading lies about being recruited to Stanford as early as 2019 and was living on campus full-time by 2021, staying in at least half a dozen dorms over the course of the next year. Baker exposes a significant institutional failure, as Stanford’s Department of Public Safety had removed Curry from campus multiple times without ever arresting him or issuing a community-wide warning. He also discovers that Curry had harassed and threatened a former girlfriend, who was also a Stanford student, but university safety officials declined to issue a warning because they did not want to “scare people too much” (49). Curry was finally found out after a resident noticed the stolen common-room television in his room and reported it to an RA. Baker’s story was picked up by national news outlets, and he appeared on Good Morning America to discuss the story. After a full week of national media attention, Stanford admitted to “gaps” in its protocols in a statement provided to other outlets but not to The Daily.

Baker is accepted into TreeHacks, an exclusive, student-run organization that hosts Stanford’s largest hackathon. The group is known on campus as a “high-signal cluster” (54), functioning as a talent funnel for venture capitalists. TreeHacks brings him into the Coupa Circuit, the insider network of student entrepreneurs and investors centered around the campus coffee shop, Coupa Café. There, he meets figures like Ivan, a student “fixer” who scouts talent for billionaires, and Julian, who creates exclusive social clubs to signal who is in and who is out on Stanford’s campus. Baker learns that success in Stanford’s inner circle depends heavily on reputation and notice from the right insiders in addition to technical skill and raw talent.

The TreeHacks team holds its fall retreat at a secluded, multimillion-dollar mansion, paid for by corporate sponsorships that give the club its “black hole budget” (69). The event is a lavish party with heavy drinking, networking with powerful alumni, and a poker tournament with a $1,000 prize. Immersed in this world of excess, Baker begins to feel a sense of unease, questioning the ethics of such unnecessary excess. As they leave the mansion, he voices his concerns to his cohort—“Like, it’s fun, but imagine what that money could do for, like, a food bank” (72)—but he’s met with silence from his new peers.

Baker receives a tip about posts on PubPeer, an online science forum, which raise questions about manipulated images in research papers co-authored by Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne (MTL). The allegations date back to 2015. Baker contacts Elisabeth Bik, a renowned scientific sleuth, who analyzes nine of MTL’s papers in total, finds no real issues in four, but identifies problems in five, confirming that several contain image problems suggesting “an intent to mislead” (85). 

Baker attends a CS107 lecture during “Ethics Week,” in which his professor discusses Therac-25, a computer-controlled radiation therapy machine designed to treat cancer patients more efficiently. The problem with Therac-25, Baker’s professor notes, was a buffer overflow. When a program generates more stored data than its temporary memory (buffer) can hold, the data overflows, corrupting or overwriting nearby data. The example emphasized the potential ethical issues that arise when scientific breakthroughs are not properly vetted. Baker’s professor emphasized that “Failures in the Therac-25 code resulted in four deaths and two permanent injuries after patients were given massive overdoses of radiation” (77). He noted that “Arrogance, a rush to produce a product, and unwillingness to address problems had deadly effects” (77).

As Baker pursues the story about MTL’s research flaws, the campus is abuzz with the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX, founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, who attended MIT, though his Stanford connections helped him secure funding. The irony is not lost on Baker that Bankman-Fried’s parents were Stanford law school professors who taught, among other things, legal ethics. He reflects on other high-profile Stanford alumni embroiled in ethical scandals, such as Theranos founder, Elizabeth Holmes, who “had been sentenced to prison for defrauding investors with her scam blood-test startup,” and Do Kwon, the co-founder and CEO of Terraform Labs who had been brought up on “criminal charges for his role in creating the cryptocurrencies Luna and TerraUSD, which, in collapsing, caused hundreds of billions of dollars of losses in the wider crypto market” (80).

Consumed by his investigation into MTL, Baker falls behind in CS107 and struggles to complete the infamous “Binary Bomb” assignment. He finally solves the complex coding puzzle by exploiting a buffer overflow vulnerability—the same design flaw discussed in the Therac-25 radiation machine. Baker feels invigorated by finding the solution. During Thanksgiving, he shares his ongoing investigation into MTL with his journalist parents, who are skeptical that “a seventeen-year-old kid” could take on this kind of story. His dad suggests that he “investigate a professor instead of the college president, [a world-renowned scientist] to start” (94). 

The story breaks open when The EMBO Journal, one of the scientific publications in which MTL’s findings were published, publicly confirms it is investigating one of the papers in question. Stanford’s official response to Baker’s inquiries reveals that MTL has known about the issues since 2015 and claims he submitted corrections that were never published. Bik, however, tells Baker she disagrees with the university’s assessment that the issues do not affect the papers’ conclusions. Baker and his editor, Sam, publish the full investigation in The Stanford Daily at 2:08 am.