Byline: Sarah Ditum

Not many 21-year-olds could justify writing a memoir, but the Stanford undergraduate Theo Baker is not an average 21-year-old. Aged 17, he became the youngest winner of the prestigious George Polk journalism award, for an investigation that brought down Stanford's president, the neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne, conducted for the student paper The Stanford Daily. It's enough to make your average embittered hack (me) feel queasy.

Even worse, by his own account, Baker didn't even plan to become a journalist. He's the son of two highly accomplished reporters (Peter Baker of The New York Times and Susan Glasser of The New Yorker, neither of whom had anything to do with his reporting on the Daily, although it presumably didn't hurt to have grown up on dinner table chatter about protecting sources and libelproofing). As Baker writes in How to Rule the World: "I loved my parents dearly, but I'd been determined to find my own path." He was at Stanford to learn to code, and there is nowhere in the world better to do that. Stanford is, undoubtedly, the centre of the tech universe. The college offers not just an education, but the chance to become one of the elect -- "the group of students who are expected to inherit the Earth".

A few generations back, as Baker explains in his potted history of the institution, Stanford was an academic underdog. It was considered a perfectly respectable place for wealthy Californians to educate their children, but certainly not on a par with Yale or Harvard. It was nicknamed "the Farm" in recognition of its rustic status.

Today, Stanford...