The president of Stanford University, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, recently announced his impending resignation after the university’s board of trustees found data manipulations in academic papers he co-authored. Though there reportedly were rumors of manipulated information in those papers, Stanford’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, officially broke the story in November 2022. Then, on July 17, a report from the university’s board of trustees that reviewed 12 papers — five where Tessier-Lavigne was a principal author — concluded that while he “did not have any knowledge of any manipulation of research data” and either “was not in a position where a reasonable scientist would be expected to have detected any such misconduct” or “was not reckless in failing to identify such manipulation prior to publication,” he also “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record.” The report also mentioned that Tessier-Lavigne “has not been able to provide an adequate explanation” for why he did not correct the scientific record on multiple occasions after concerns were raised.
In a July 19 statement, Tessier-Lavigne said, “Although the report clearly refutes the allegations of fraud and misconduct that were made against me, for the good of the university, I have made the decision to step down as president effective August 31.”
The issues with Tessier-Lavigne’s research were brought to light in large part due to the work of reporters at The Stanford Daily, who reported tirelessly on this issue for nearly a year. Teen Vogue called Theo Baker, 18, the Stanford first-year who published multiple investigations into Tessier-Lavigne’s history, to learn more about how the school newspaper landed a scoop that ultimately became national news.
This conversation was condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Teen Vogue: What originally made you interested in investigating Stanford’s president and his research?
Theo Baker: I got an initial tip in September. Someone reached out and let me know that there had been these musings in obscure scientific forums about images that seemed to have been placed together or photoshopped in papers that Tessier-Lavigne had co-authored. So, I said, “I’m going to take this and go talk to some actual forensic image analysts, people who are familiar with the science and can give me background.” And we worked from there until we had our first investigation published in November. Later that day, the board of trustees opened an investigation for a story about just four papers that he was a co-author on. The end result of our reporting has identified at least 12.
TV: Were these tips being sent to you specifically because you were the investigations editor?
TB: I was not the editor at that time; I had just joined the Daily two weeks earlier. But I had written a few pieces that had gotten a lot of traction. Specifically, my first piece was an investigation into what students call the “war on fun,” which is a sort of bureaucratic tightening on social life that has worried a lot of safety advocates as well as people who are interested in having a vibrant social scene at Stanford. And then I had just reported a story about a man who had been living on campus pretending to be a student for a year while Stanford knew about it and failed to warn people. So, it was off the back of those stories that a lot of people started reaching out to me with tips and I just happened to decide to dig deeply on this one.
TV: Were you nervous at all that the digging you were doing was going to get back to the president or the administration and have adverse effects on you as a student?
TB: I remember one consideration for that first story that we were really careful about was trying to quote as few Stanford people as possible. The main consideration was we didn't want to get people potentially in trouble with Tessier-Lavigne. The first investigation was really honestly an example of an open-source investigation. It relied on a lot of things that were already sort of hidden in plain sight. And it took people actually starting to ask questions about it for it to start to come out.
Obviously, it's an interesting decision to investigate the head of the school you go to. I was cognizant of that from the beginning. From the very start, we have had a lot of really fantastic lawyers and wonderful outside journalistic advisers and that helped me be confident in my own reporting. It takes a team to decide to do something like that. It takes editors who have faith in you to publish a story that could potentially have ramifications that ended up being quite large.
TV: Aside from your reporting and reporting from the Daily, what was the mood on campus like? Was the president generally well-liked or were there other people pushing for him to resign as well?
TB: I'm maybe not the best situated now because people talking to me knew that they were talking to the person who was doing this reporting. I will say that independent of Tessier-Lavigne, there are some deep frustrations right now among the undergraduate population at Stanford that we have been working to report. There is frankly a disastrous neighborhood system that they've just implemented, which has left a lot of frustration. There have been a number of suicides where students and even some outside observers place a fair amount of blame on Stanford for the way that they handled those cases. So I think that there's frustration with students at Stanford right now. I wouldn't be able to tell you exactly how much of that was directed at Tessier-Lavigne himself. (In an email to Teen Vogue, Stett Holbrook, Stanford's senior director of media relations and issues management, said, "The neighborhood system is currently being evaluated. As you can read here, we have learned a great deal over the first two years of implementation of our shared vision for housing and we remain committed to a process of ongoing feedback and iterative improvements.)
TV: Was Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation your goal from the start of your reporting?
TB: I certainly did not go into this with a personal vendetta against Tessier-Lavigne and my goals from the start have not been outcome focused. I really just tried to get my head down and look into these allegations and get a comprehensive picture as to what happened.
TV: Your team at The Daily recently won a Polk Award for your investigations. How did that feel?
TB: It was a complete shock. It's never been given to a college student before. The idea that these professional journalists would actively go out of their way to say, “Hey, we're standing behind you,” in a moment that for us was full of vulnerability, really meant the world. It's really hard to put into words exactly how gratifying it was to be recognized by people I have respected and admired for a lot longer than I’ve been doing this work.
TV: Have you always wanted to be a journalist? Is that what you want to do when you graduate?
TB: There’s been a lot of online discourse from people who very rightly question the privileges I have as the child of two journalists, who ( I’m biased) I think are pretty good at their job. It's been a reason I said I will never be a journalist because it's what my parents [who work at The New York Times and The New Yorker] do. I want to go and make my own path. And so the fact that I stumbled into this was a total accident. It was born out of a desire to feel connected to my late grandfather, who passed just two weeks before I started at Stanford, and who would always sit down and talk about his time doing student journalism.
Going into this, my hope was not at all to end up breaking national stories or doing anything that would result in something like this. And I'm still not sure that I want to be a journalist. The work that I've done is my own and I feel really strongly about that. I utilized only the resources available to every staffer here at the Daily. I feel proud of the work and, at the same time, I'm not sure if this is what I'm cut out to do for the rest of my life.
TV: Are you hopeful that the huge impact your stories at The Daily have had could set a precedent for the change student newspapers are capable of effecting? What do you wish more people knew about the work student journalists are doing that has an impact on people outside of a campus bubble?
TB: I think student journalists across the country are making really tough decisions to report on communities that they also belong to. And yet their decisions are made out of love because if you truly love a community, you're going to push it harder than anyone else to be transparent. I think across the country, we've seen some fantastic student journalism this year: at the [Daily] Northwestern recently, the [Harvard] Crimson did some fantastic work, and the Columbia Daily Spectator had fantastic stories. I really think student journalists are just as savvy and just as capable as professional journalists when they're given the tools to succeed. So, I really hope this does open up more conversations about the role of student journalism and holding power to account.
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