By Nanette Asimov, Staff Writer Dec 12, 2025 (SFChronicle.com)
Gift Article
Theo Baker, the Stanford freshman whose investigative reporting led to the ouster of the university’s president in 2023, has not yet graduated. His forthcoming book, an exposé about Stanford mixed with a bit of memoir, is due out this spring, a month before he graduates.Provided by Penguin Press, Courtesy of Theo Baker
It’s a hard act to follow. But Theo Baker, who managed to oust the president of Stanford University while a freshman reporter on his student newspaper, is now poised to explain “How to Rule the World,” the title of his forthcoming book about Stanford’s role in cultivating billionaires and other potentates.
Baker’s book, subtitled “An Education in Power at Stanford University,” is due out May 19, about a month before the author earns his college diploma — on time — in June.
Baker was 17 in fall 2022 when he began working for the Stanford Daily and got a tip that scholarly papers co-authored by the university’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, contained errors, including manipulated imagery.
Baker transformed into a dogged reporter not unlike his father, Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, and his mother, Susan Glasser, a staff writer on the New Yorker.
The freshman’s dozen or so investigative stories — tracked and followed by journalists across the country — prompted a Stanford investigation that found “serious flaws” among papers co-authored over 20 years by Tessier-Lavigne, a neuroscientist. He ultimately retracted three studies. The probe found no evidence that he knowingly falsified data.
By summer 2023, Tessier-Lavigne resigned and Baker became the youngest recipient of the George Polk Award, one of journalism’s most prestigious prizes.
With more than five months left before Baker’s book is out, neither he nor his publisher are talking about it yet or sharing early copies. A book description from Penguin Press sheds light about its focus.
“Theo Baker showed up for freshman year at Stanford University as a tech-obsessed coder. It seemed like paradise. There were Rodin sculptures next to nuclear laboratories and inventors lounging with Olympians. But Baker soon discovered a culture that embraced corner-cutting, that vested infinite excess and access in the hands of kids with few safeguards to catch bad behavior.”
“How to Rule the World” is part exposé of Stanford — “less a school than a business” where certain wealthy, brainy students are cultivated as future members of the “ruling elite” — and part memoir of the wunderkind who peeled back the curtain and revealed what he saw.
Baker, now 20 and majoring in history, spoke with more than 250 people for his book: not only professors, students and campus administrators, but also former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, director of Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, and Stanford dropout Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI.
To write the book, Baker took off the fall and winter terms of his junior year — and no, no professor offered academic credit for his extracurricular efforts.
Baker took high-unit courses to graduate on time. He also received course credit for helping teach “Coding for Social Good,” and relied on college-level credits he earned in high school.
Between writing “How to Rule the World” and toppling the leader of the nation’s third wealthiest university, Baker, as a sophomore, also gave the nation an in-depth account of campus tensions following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel, and Israel’s counterinvasion.
On March 26, 2024, the Atlantic Magazine published “The War at Stanford: I didn’t know that college could be a factory of unreason,” which begins with an account of a 23-year-old student in Baker’s computer science class telling student protesters that he supported killing then-President Joe Biden for being “guilty of mass murder” and that Hamas should instead govern the U.S.
While Baker acknowledged that this student’s views were atypical, “few students would call for Biden’s head — I think,” his article introduced readers to a historic period of rising student hysteria on the private, elite campus while mirroring the tensions on university campuses across the country at the time.
Generations of students have protested Wall Street excesses, South African apartheid, the Vietnam War, and for civil rights — and been injured or even died for those causes. But until the current Middle East conflict, they rarely turned on each other.
Stanford became “fractured” as the Middle East war escalated, Baker wrote. “Extremism has swept through classrooms and dorms, and it is becoming normal for students to be harassed and intimidated for their faith, heritage, or appearance — they have been called perpetrators of genocide for wearing kippahs, and accused of supporting terrorism for wearing keffiyehs.”
As for where Baker stood in all of this, he wrote, “I grew up secularly, with no strong affiliation to Jewish culture.” He learned as a teenager that dozens of his relatives had died in the Holocaust, but said he did not feel a stronger emotional connection to having Jewish roots until “I saw so many people I know cheering after Oct. 7.”
But his frustration about the conflicts on campus had “little to do with my own identity.” Instead, at one of the world’s greatest academic institutions, he discovered “a persistent anti-intellectual streak.”
He offered the example of complaints made to the university about parties where, in order for students to get in, they had to say “f— Israel” or “free Palestine.”
“A place that was supposed to be a sanctuary from such unreason has become a factory for it,” he said, quoting a friend’s email.
Baker’s book isn’t out yet. But some of his observations in the Atlantic piece nevertheless shed light on the university, historically an incubator of American leaders.
“Readers may be tempted to discount the conduct displayed at Stanford,” he wrote. “After all, the thinking goes, these are privileged kids doing what they always do: embracing faux-radicalism in college before taking jobs in fintech or consulting. These students, some might say, aren’t representative of America.
“And yet they are representative of something: of the conduct many of the most accomplished students in my generation have accepted as tolerable, and what that means for the future of our country.”
Dec 12, 2025
Higher Education Reporter
Nanette covers California’s public universities – the University of California and California State University – as well as community colleges and private universities. She’s written about sexual misconduct at UC and Stanford, the precarious state of accreditation at City College of San Francisco, and what happens when the UC Berkeley student government discovers a gay rights opponent in its midst. She has exposed a private art college where students rack up massive levels of debt (one student’s topped $400k), and covered audits peering into UC finances, education lawsuits and countless student protests.
But writing about higher education also means getting a look at the brainy creations of students and faculty: Robotic suits that help paralyzed people walk. Online collections of folk songs going back hundreds of years. And innovations touching on everything from virtual reality to baseball.
Nanette is also covering the COVID-19 pandemic and served as health editor during the first six months of the crisis, which quickly ended her brief tenure as interim investigations editor.
Previously, Nanette covered K-12 education. Her stories led to changes in charter school laws, prompted a ban on Scientology in California public schools, and exposed cheating and censorship in testing.
A past president of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Northern California chapter, Nanette has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and a B.A. in sociology from Queens College. She speaks English and Spanish.
