Editor’s Note: A previous version of this essay did not clarify that a Stanford-commissioned investigation found that Marc Tessier-Lavigne did not personally engage in scientific fraud. The essay has been updated for clarity.

Late in the Victorian Age, the British scholar Lord Acton proclaimed, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” That thought came quickly to mind as I read a remarkable new book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, by Stanford undergraduate Theo Baker, who is graduating in about three weeks.

Baker is extremely bright and driven. He is the only child of journalistic royalty; his father made his fame at the New York Times, his mother at the New Yorker,Politico, and other outlets. As a freshman working on the campus newspaper, the Stanford Daily, he worked to uncover alleged scientific malfeasance by famed neuroscientist and then-Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Although an independent Stanford investigation concluded that Tessier-Lavigne himself did not commit research fraud or engage in scientific misconduct, his co-authored Alzheimer’s research was found to include erroneous data. Baker began the investigation relatively illiterate in matters relating to scientific knowledge and proper research procedures.

As a non-alumnus, I thought I knew Stanford well. I seriously considered going there and was accepted for admission in 1958, when my father was contemplating taking a job in California. I lived on the fringes of Stanford’s immense 8,100-acre campus for a few months in the 1980s and had friends on the faculties of both Stanford and its famed affiliate, the Hoover Institution. But Stanford’s immense wealth and power largely evolved out of the Silicon Valley computer boom that followed, leading to the creation of the first tech billionaires. Stanford was the epicenter of the Silicon Valley tech boom, and the quest for tech-created billions permeated the culture of the school. This led to teenage Stanford freshmen with perceived tech potential being courted by firms, with many of them, including Baker, invited to parties on yachts and at mansions, or, in one instance, courted by a tech entrepreneur while he fed his eight-month-old baby caviar at an exclusive restaurant.

With more administrators than students, according to Baker, an oppressive Stanford bureaucracy unofficially declared a War on Fun, where ultra woke apparatchiks required kids attending a fraternity party to swear that they deplored the treatment of “indigenous peoples” by the white male founders of the area, before being admitted. But the main theme, according to Baker: nearly everyone at Stanford was caught up in the quest for wealth and power associated with successful high-tech startups. After all, such wealthy corporations as Apple, Meta, and Google were headquartered there. Aspiring billionaires lured bright scientific and/or entrepreneurial freshmen early, and Baker was part of that group. (I suspect, however, that, like on most campuses, many students exhibited much different behavioral characteristics than the one he described; not all enrollees were nerds seeking tech nirvana.)

As Baker beautifully tells his compelling story, standards of honesty, integrity, loyalty, and other cardinal virtues were forgotten in the quest for money and power, even among many faculty and administrators. A question arose: how far has American higher education changed since its colonial roots? The main occupational goal for colonial college students was to become a minister and promote virtue among the population. The first job of college was to raise the moral fiber of the population, promoting the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments. By the 1960s or 1980s, more emphasis was being placed on socialization: getting drunk, getting high, and having sex were of prime importance. According to Baker, today’s college and university students crave wealth and power.

For most recent American college graduates, however, Baker’s book would seem foreign. Most students, for instance, go to state schools or non-elite private institutions. They don’t go to yacht parties. The average student increasingly worries that the artificial intelligence revolution will upend their job prospects. And most college and university kids are not as bright, well-trained, or have as good parental connections as Theo Baker. Most don’t even aspire to “Rule the World.”

Baker himself is aware of all this. He wonders whether colleges and universities try to do too much, like run such things as hospitals and clinics or quasi-professional football programs that have little or nothing to do with the primary university functions of discovering and disseminating knowledge. He correctly thinks that colleges and universities have too many administrators. He also talks about his own and fellow students’ mental health issues; their being divorced from the real world and over-immersed in their social media.

He summarizes the book well in its prologue (p. 13): “this is a book … about an institution that is profoundly influential—and deeply inaccessible. It is about a culture that embraces getting ahead at any cost, that lacks safe-guards to fully address bad behavior … where geniuses are … ready to reinvent the world but taught instead how to prioritize their self-interest.” At the book’s end, he adds “this university has made a Faustian bargain with Silicon Valley, one that has enabled its meteoric ascent and allowed for its corruption.”       

How to Rule the World is a great read. I would rather spend an hour with Theo Baker than with virtually any university president or professor I know. He demonstrates that in this world with an often-spotty education system, we still turn out young adults who are extremely impressive and who, someday, may even come close to ruling the world. He also points out that our extremely costly way of educating our best and brightest has many flaws.