How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University
By Theo Baker
Penguin, 337 pages, $32
Fraud is an ancient practice, but these days its prevalence and scale seems to be increasing. The latest evidence for this comes from How to Rule the World, by the recent Stanford graduate Theo Baker. At one level the book is about how Baker, as a college freshman working for the student newspaper The Stanford Daily, got the president of his university fired for having perpetrated scientific fraud over at least a decade and a half. At another level, the book offers an ethnographic account of the culture of fraud that prevails not just at Stanford but across elite American institutions.
The culture of fraud at Stanford, in Baker’s account, is as ubiquitous as soot in a nineteenth-century industrial city: on every surface, in every crevice, floating in the air you breathe. An early hint of the problem appears in the “war on fun” that has stripped the soul out of student life. Parties, Baker tells us, are very rare. Fraternity parties seem to happen only one at a time, and like every other party, require approval by the university’s official Party Review Committee. Applications must be submitted by Tuesday if your party is to occur on the weekend. Before entering the festivities, Baker recalls, partygoers had to first recite and agree to a consent policy, followed by a land acknowledgment. (In an apparent concession to the “vibe shift,” Stanford dropped the land acknowledgement in October 2025.)
Baker passes no judgment on these rituals, but a picture emerges of students who draw ethical and political conclusions that are the opposite of what is intended. Many who attend these fraternity parties no doubt think the land acknowledgment is ridiculous. When they recite it, they are in effect spouting lies mandated by university administrators. Regardless of what the administrators think is going on, the real lesson—lie to get ahead—is received.