Theo Baker

That policy didn't exist.

Right.

But they threatened someone for daring to speak with me and criticizing how the school was operating.

And that was, I think, very early lesson in what I would come to expect from from reporting at Stanford.

I don't know how much clout I have.

Ask the average student.

But no, I mean, look, student journalism is an amazing thing, right?

That you can be a 17 and 18 year old and ask questions about things that should have been asked years earlier.

Mark Tessie Levine, right, is this superstar neuroscientist and fabulously wealthy from his time as a biotech executive.

He begins the year with his greatest triumph, in the words of many, by opening Stanford's first new school since 1948, the Doar School of Sustainability, with a billion-dollar donation from John Doar, the venture capitalist.

He ends the year, as is reported for the first time in this book, ousted unanimously by his own board of trustees because of new allegations that have been raised over the course of this reporting.

And what are the allegations?

Basically, what I found over the course of eight months of investigating was that at various labs that Mark Tessier-Levine had overseen at different institutions, researchers under his supervision had falsified results, had falsified the data leading to papers that he co-authored.

And that at various points when Mark Tessier-Levine was made aware of issues in his studies, he did not correct or retract those papers.

Well, look, Mark Tessier Levine was held up as a perfect avatar of Stanford.

He was its figurehead.

And so I think it's fair to say that some of his conduct reflects on, you know, the values of the institution, that this is a legitimately impressive person, right?

He's the first in his family to go to college.

He earns a Rhodes Scholarship, creates an entirely new field of research in the 1990s by discovering something called the Netrin.

And then this is when colleagues say that as he begins to segue into positions of higher and higher acclaim, in the words of one, he becomes sort of royal, hands-off, distant from the day-to-day, that his lab culture begins to change.