Book Review: Kid rules the world

Theo Baker's How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University tells the story of a freshman reporter who brings down a university president, but the real subject sits one level above that plot. The book is about what happens when an institution built to educate starts to run itself like a company with shareholders to protect rather than a faculty to serve. Baker never states this as his thesis, but every scene where lawyers and public relations teams move faster than any dean or professor proves it for him. Stanford, in his telling, behaves less like the university of old and more like a corporation defending its stock price.

What struck me first, before any of the argument, was simply the writing. Baker was nineteen or twenty when he wrote this, and the prose reads as if it came from someone twice his age who had spent decades learning how to build a case. The book is gripping in the plain sense of the word. You keep reading past the point where you meant to stop, and you finish it a little amazed that the person who forced out a sitting university president had not yet finished his own degree.

I grew up as what people sometimes call a campus brat, spending the first fifteen years of my life inside the boundaries of a college campus before I understood what a campus was actually for. Decades later I found my way back to one, though from a very different angle.  I do have several personal connections to people who studied there, both undergraduate and MBA, going back many years. Reading Baker's account of Stanford as an incubator with dorms, I knew the campus he describes, but from the other side of the table. 

Baker himself is the book's most complicated character, mostly because he is also its narrator, and he does not always seem aware of the tension that creates. He is gifted at building an argument out of small pieces of evidence, patient in a way that few nineteen year olds are, and genuinely brave in the face of pressure that would have made most adults fold. He is also, at times, a little too pleased with his own audacity, and feels like he is re-creating All The Presidents Men.

The former University President, Marc Tessier-Lavigne comes across as the more interesting figure, even though Baker gives him less sympathy than his own backstory earns. A man who rose from a modest Canadian family through McGill, Oxford, Columbia, and Genentech before becoming Stanford's president is not a simple villain, and the book is strongest when it lets that complexity sit next to the misconduct rather than erasing it for the sake of a cleaner story. Elisabeth Bik, the image forensics expert Baker recruits, is the real reason the investigation works, though she gets far less space on the page than her role deserves. 

The Stanford administration itself is where the book is thinnest. The Board of Trustees and the legal and public relations apparatus around it never become people in these pages, only a single defensive reflex that responds to bad news by trying to make it disappear, and only changes course once disappearing the problem is no longer possible. This is probably true of any bureaucracy come to think of it.

The place the book earns real criticism is its handling of the so called War on Fun, the crackdown on parties and Greek life that Baker treats mostly as bureaucratic overreach against ordinary college fun. Left out of that account is the fact that much of the crackdown followed campus sexual assault cases, Chanel Miller's among them, which gave the administration a real reason to act that has nothing to do with joylessness. Leaving that context out does not just weaken one chapter. It changes what the reader thinks the book is arguing.

I will not walk through exactly how the story ends, since some of us have not finished it yet, but I will say the cost of the outcome is not evenly shared, and Baker is honest enough to admit that some of the people who helped him paid a higher price than he did.

Structurally, the book reads less like a memoir and more like the case file it describes. Baker lays out his evidence the way an investigator lays out proof, one piece at a time, until the conclusion feels inevitable before he ever states it outright. It is a fitting shape for a book about a man accused of manipulating data, since the book itself never asks you to take anything on faith.

For his efforts Baker becomes the youngest ever winner of the highest award in journalism, the George Polk award.  A wonderful recognition of a book that was truly compelling to read.

Now .... what was I doing at age 19, I wonder?!