Our brave (?) new world

 While I do grieve the world I grew up in, I also feel a compulsion to try to understand the one we are living in now.  Thus I took the trouble to read and summarize here the recent biography of Elon Musk and the remarkable book Careless People that described the inner workings of Facebook.   This week I took time between World Cup games to read How to Rule the World, by  Theo Baker, who just graduated from Stanford University.  It details his experience as a student journalist pursuing a story that led to the resignation of the Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne.  It told me more than anything I have read about the current state of elite higher education and about the practices of our new economy.

Some of what I learned did not come directly from the book, because Baker has lived his whole life in a particular environment and takes a good deal of it for granted.  The 18-year old kids admitted differ in many ways, but they have one critical thing in common: they have spent their whole lives building their resumes, academically, in extracurricular activities, athletically, and even, in some cases, in business.  They know that about 24 kids were rejected for the place that they occupy, and they now have to cope with tuition and fees amounting to around $100,000 per year.  That, I think, is why faculty, supported or encouraged by administrators, do not dare give them grades lower than A- on their work.  And that in turn has had terrible consequences for undergraduate life.  

Meanwhile, Baker discovered, Stanford undergraduates had to fight against the War on Fun, an extraordinary, endless roll of administrative regulations of campus life.  Students cannot hold social events without getting permission, even within fraternities.  When such parties occur students have to pledge to ask for and receive consent to any sexual acts before entering, and to recite, "I am on stolen land. . . .I will commit to uplifting Indigenous and Black voices" before entering.  Strict regulations against alcohol consumption have driven binge drinking off campus, just as at Harvard, they have turned the Final Clubs--whom no one but their own membership cared a thing about when I was an undergrad--into the main social focus of campus life because they are the only places allowed to have parties, a privilege they shamelessly exploit in selecting whom to admit.  Such regulations, I think, have two sources. One, obviously, is the woke ideology that dominates campus administration far more than it does the faculty, and one is the absolute terror of the administration, from the President on down, of any publicity for incidents leading to the harm of any students.  

These students, meanwhile, are looking for ways to distinguish themselves, which academic performance does not allow them to do.  Many of them---far more than among Boomers or Gen X--are serious athletes, which endears them to Wall Street recruiters, who like competitive young people. Many of the combine their major with one or more minors, which often allow them to combine their economic aspirations on the one hand with a purported social justice commitment on the other. Some of them, like that eminent Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg, start businesses.  And as Baker shows, many of them get right into networking groups that are sponsored by established tech workers or venture capitalists who are looking for the next Mark Zuckerberg in the same way that NBA and NFL scouts are looking for the next superstar.  Baker introduces us to a number of fellow students who are determined to be billionaires and don't care what they have to do to get there.  Elizabeth Holmes, now serving a ten-year sentence for fraud in connection with Theranos's blood-testing scam--which initially won the support of a lot of prominent men who should have known better--was a Stanford product, and she, like Gordon Gecko, appears to be inspiring as many other undergrads as she is deterring them from following her example.  Another infamous Millennial fraudster, Sam Bankman-Fried, was a Stanford Law School faculty brat, whose parents had persuaded him to contribute $5.5 million to the university (this from Business Insider.)

Which brings us to the real subject of the book, the academic misconduct of Marc Tessier-Lavigne, which led to his resignation from Stanford at the end of Baker's freshman year, thanks largely to a series of articles he wrote for the Stanford newspaper.  The key episode (although far from the only one) in this story was a paper Tessier-Lavigne had co-authored in 2009 while working at the biotech firm Genotech, which argued that a previously neglected protein played a key role in the development of Alzheimer's disease.  I learned a lot about the grant world--which is clearly similar to the venture capital world that has become much bigger than the grant world--during the 1980s when I taught at Carnegie Mellon, a university that was way ahead of its time.  This episode, it seemed to me, epitomized what was wrong with it.

Alzheimer's is one of the most serious diseases now plaguing the human race, destroying the lives of about half a million Americans every year.  Effective preventive measures or a cure would constitute a medical breakthrough comparable in scale to the development of antibiotics.  That means that any new insight about the disease that might open the way to effective countermeasures could be a long-term economic bonanza for researchers who developed it, funding their attempts to translate it into practice.  That is what made this paper a sensation in the Alzheimer's research community.  The problem, as some people began to suspect almost at once, was that the paper rested upon falsified data--altered images or repeated images to make its case.  The problem in research communities, and not only in medical fields, is that the rewards of coming up with such results are so great that it is not surprising that people--and who they were in this case was never exactly identified--almost inevitably give in to temptation.  In ongoing studies researchers face the equally powerful imperative to show continuing results to renew their grants, which is at least as great a temptation.  Tessier-Lavigne co-authored a number of other papers with these problems as well, and questions had been raised about them at the time that he became president of Stanford, but without result.

I have seen a similar dynamic at play in history.  Again and again, scholars make their reputation with a "ground-breaking" piece of work that seems to put forward something new.  Certain other scholars immediately realize that there are serious problems with their interpretation, but almost no one will listen to them if the new interpretation has financial or ideological implications that jive with the spirit of the times.  Tessier-Lavigne, like Henry Kissinger or Niall Ferguson in our own time, had established a legendary reputation and it seemed much easier not to challenge it.  He was also known, as Baker found, as a frightening man to cross.  Nonetheless Baker persisted in gathering evidence with the help of independent scholars, and the Stanford Board of Trustees appointed a committee to investigate that produced a pretty damning report, softened by a generous introduction.  Before the report was released, Baker found, the Board convinced Tessier-Lavigne to resign.  He received a generous severance settlement and promptly secured enormous funding for a new firm of his own.  That presumably will end his fund-raising activities for some time, whereas if he had remained president of Stanford they would have taken up a large portion of his working hours.  Baker estimates his net worth as more than $500 million--"or, roughly, the net worths of the CEOs of Ford, Coca-Cola, and Bank of America combined."

In the midst of the controversy which Baker's original articles about the disputed studies kicked off, Baker received a threatening letter from a lawyer named Steve Neal, who turns out to have been one year behind me at Harvard ('70) and a graduate of, wouldn't you know it, Stanford Law School.  The notorious Savings and Loan fraudster Charles Keating, who had become the face of the S & L scandal in the late 1980s, had retained Neal after he was convicted of fraud, sent to prison, and found liable for a $4.3 billion civil judgment.  According to Baker, Neal successfully persuaded both California and federal courts to throw out Keating's convictions because of procedural errors--something I didn't remember at all. Keating had to plead guilty to much-reduced charges but was sentenced merely to time served.  Neal also got the civil judgment reversed.  He then started his own firm in Silicon Valley and eventually represented Elizabeth Holmes, evidently with much less success.  He flatly denied all Baker's accusations against Tessier-Lavigne in emails to him, but he could not save his job.  Obviously Tessier-Lavigne had no problem paying him a large fee.

That story, in turn, got me thinking about Donald Trump, who for me hovered over the whole book.  Like Keating, and to a much lesser extent, Tessier-Lavigne, he has built his whole extraordinary career in real estate, in entertainment, and in politics, on a mixture of false claims and intimidation, managing all the while to escape any negative consequences at the hands of the legal system.  (He now seems stuck with a $5.8 million judgment that he needs to pay for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, but I'm not counting him out yet.)  To put it bluntly, I wonder now whether Trump is not much less of a sui generis figure than we like to think.  Our society--including our politics--has been filled since the last quarter of the last century with people making extraordinary fortunes and rising to great power based on false representations of one kind or another, who very rarely have to pay for what they have done.  Our legal system has become so complex and so expensive that the wealthy--who also include the Sackler family, who gave us the opioid epidemic--nearly always escape personal liability.  Two recent exceptions to this rule, Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes, also figure in Baker's narrative.  Both of them are now doing time. I don't think it's a coincidence that they are both Millennials.  The older generations are making examples of two young people who had followed some of their elders' example.  That is often the way of history.  Now both of them are undoubtedly exploring the pardon market that the second Trump administration has established, and I'd be willing to make a small bet that Bankman-Fried will be successful.  Holmes is a paradoxical case. The excellent HBO documentary about her convinced me that she never could have impressed so many powerful older men were she not blond and beautiful.  Now she is being treated harshly in revenge.

Stanford was one of the dozens of highly reputable universities and colleges that I applied to for a job at one time or another, without result.  I now see that I was probably lucky to be exiled from mainstream elite higher education, where there was no longer any place for a new person like myself.  I spent my time teaching good students and writing the books I wanted to write--books that my academic contemporaries weren't interested in.  That was their problem. Such is the influence of contemporary academic thought (if it can be called that) that publishing houses, including university presses, aren't interested in the kinds of books I write any more either. I don't care.  I'm perhaps one quarter of the way through a new one now, and loving every minute of it, even though I know I will probably end up publishing it myself.  

Theo Baker has now graduated from Stanford.  He is the son of esteemed journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, who have worked at the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. He says repeatedly in the book that he had no intention of becoming a journalist himself because of his parents' background, but he showed up at the Stanford Daily and immediately began working on pieces about campus life.  Now he has a decision to make.  He has a gift for investigative journalism, but I, for what it is worth, would not advise him to follow his parents into famous legacy institutions.  Journalism is falling into the hands of our new economic powers and that will have big consequences.  I would urge him to think about becoming a podcaster specializing in investigations like the one he just did.  He would have no intermediary between himself and his listeners and could say what he thinks.  He could make a big contribution to the real role of journalists and historians:  allowing readers "better to enjoy life, and better to endure it."