HOW TO RULE THE WORLD

Review

SECTION ONE — Bookstore recommendation In the spring of 2023, a Stanford undergraduate named Theo Baker began asking questions that the university's own board had not thought to ask: were the neuroscience papers underpinning Marc Tessier-Lavigne's reputation as a scientist actually accurate? The answer, after months of document review, expert interviews, and published reporting in the Stanford Daily, was no. *How to Rule the World* is Baker's account of that investigation — how a student, working within the ordinary constraints of a college newspaper, assembled enough evidence of data manipulation to prompt an independent review that ended the tenure of one of American higher education's most powerful administrators. The book is aimed at readers who care about institutional accountability, science integrity, and the specific question of what one person without institutional standing can accomplish when the people with standing have chosen silence. It is a case study in investigative method told from the inside, and it answers a question that most readers will not have known to ask: why are the people best positioned to catch misconduct in elite institutions so often the last ones to act? SECTION TWO — Catholic anthropological reading - **Created**: The book rests on an implicit but firm conviction that truth is not negotiable — that falsified data is a genuine harm regardless of the status of the person who benefits from it. This maps directly onto the CCMMP's first-state account of the human person as made for truth: rationality is not merely instrumental but constitutive of personhood, and distorting the record of scientific inquiry is an offense against the cognitive dignity of every researcher who builds on that record. - **Fallen**: The misconduct at the center of the story is a textbook instance of what Aquinas calls the disordering of appetite toward false goods — specifically, the desire for prestige and institutional power overtaking the commitment to honest inquiry. What Baker documents is not a single act of fraud but a pattern sustained over years inside a system that rewarded the appearance of excellence more than its substance, which is precisely the condition Aquinas describes when concupiscence becomes habituated into an institution's culture rather than remaining a personal failing. - **Redeemed**: Baker's journalism functions in the book as an instrument of what the CCMMP calls restorative justice — not punishment for its own sake but the correction of a disordered situation so that the institution can return to its proper end. Tessier-Lavigne's resignation is not framed as triumph; Baker treats it as a partial and costly recovery of something that had been quietly lost. - **Prudence (circumspection and foresight)**: The book's investigative method models the integral parts of prudence with unusual clarity. Baker did not move from suspicion to accusation; he moved from anomaly to expert corroboration to documented pattern, exercising the circumspection that attends to obstacles and the foresight that anticipates what a wrong conclusion would cost. This makes the book useful to anyone — student, professional, or administrator — who needs to think through what careful moral judgment actually looks like in a fact-gathering situation. - **Justice (truthfulness and just correction)**: The virtue most consistently on display is truthfulness as Aquinas describes it in the *Summa* II-II: the disposition to represent things as they are, not as one wishes them to be, even when misrepresentation would be safer. Baker's willingness to publish and stand behind findings that implicated one of Stanford's most prominent figures is an exercise of this virtue under real institutional pressure. SECTION THREE — Conversation with the canon Mintzberg[^1], in *Managers Not MBAs*, observes that academic tenure — designed to protect the freedom of expression of faculty from external political pressure — has in practice shifted the threat inward: powerful colleagues can now deny tenure to the maverick, meaning the institutional structure meant to protect honest inquiry has become one of the mechanisms that suppresses it. Baker's account of how Stanford's own review processes failed to surface Tessier-Lavigne's data problems for years sits directly inside this diagnosis. The silence was not external censorship; it was the self-protective logic of an institution where careers are bound to the reputations of senior figures. Hunter Lewis[^2], in *Crony Capitalism in America*, maps the same pattern across economic and political institutions: when prestige and resource allocation become decoupled from honest performance, the people best positioned to raise alarms have the strongest personal incentives not to. Baker's book is, among other things, a case study in what Lewis's structural argument looks like at the level of a single lab and a single career. ## References 1. Mintzberg, Henry (2004). *Managers Not MBAs*. "Beyond Tenure" section. — "tenure often menaces freedom of expression... the threat to the maverick academic now comes less from the outside than from the inside" 2. Lewis, Hunter (2013). *Crony Capitalism in America*. Part One: Introduction.

✓ Strengths

• ✓Baker's investigation models the Thomistic conviction that truth is ordered to justice: the exposure of data falsification at Stanford is not mere scandal-seeking but a concrete act of rendering to the academic community what it was owed — accurate knowledge about the integrity of its own leadership.
• ✓The book affirms the dignity of the individual person against institutional power, illustrating how one person's fidelity to evidence can correct a disordered institutional culture that had subordinated truth to prestige.
• ✓Baker demonstrates prudentia in its integral parts: circumspection in assessing the university's internal dynamics, foresight in anticipating how falsified data distorts downstream research, and sound judgment in deciding when the evidence warranted public disclosure.
• ✓The narrative arc from disorder (fabricated research) to correction (resignation) follows the Redeemed state's logic: brokenness in institutions is not final; it can be named, confronted, and at least partially restored through courageous witness to truth.
• ✓The book offers a practically teachable account of how a non-expert pursues an investigative standard — gathering evidence, seeking expert corroboration, accepting uncertainty — that models docility and intellectual humility rather than ideological certainty.

⚠ Considerations

• ⚠The book's framework is journalistic and secular; it gives no account of the interior moral life of the persons involved, leaving the question of culpability and conversion entirely at the institutional level, which is an anthropologically thin reading of human failure.
• ⚠There is a risk that the narrative valorizes the individual investigator in a way that could foster a disposition of suspicion toward all authority rather than the Catholic virtue of properly ordered obedience and trust in legitimate governance structures.
• ⚠The book does not address the structural conditions that make elite institutions chronically susceptible to this kind of misconduct — a gap that leaves the reader with a satisfying resolution but an incomplete diagnosis.