Theo Baker | |
---|---|
Born | 2004or2005(age 18–19) |
Organization | The Stanford Daily |
Parents |
Theo Baker (born 2004 or 2005) is an American investigative journalist for The Stanford Daily , the student newspaper of Stanford University. [1] In 2023, he became the youngest recipient of the George Polk Award for his reporting that led to the resignation of Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. [1] [2]
As a freshman reporter at The Stanford Daily, Baker began publishing stories in November 2022 about accusations that Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne had altered images used in research papers, leading to a formal investigation from the university. [3] [4] Baker learned about the accusations through the scientific review website PubPeer and brought them to scientific integrity expert Elisabeth Bik. [3] A lawyer representing Tessier-Lavigne sent letters to Baker, describing his reporting as "replete with falsehoods". [5]
In July 2023, the final university report found that Tessier-Lavigne's research "fell below customary standards of scientific rigor and process" but did not constitute fraud. [6] Baker subsequently published another story that the investigating panel did not grant some witnesses anonymity, so they were unable to testify because of active non-disclosure agreements. [3] Tessier-Lavigne announced his resignation as Stanford's president on July 19, 2023, with multiple major news outlets, including The New York Times and The Washington Post , characterizing it as a direct result of The Stanford Daily stories. [6] [7]
In late March 2024, an article by Baker, titled 'The War at Stanford,' was published in The Atlantic . [8] The article discussed the response of Stanford University to the October 7 Attack, arguing that the attack was not adequately condemned. Similarly, Baker asserted that pro-Palestine students' rhetoric led to antisemitism and created a culture of fear for Jews on campus. [8] The article also mentioned an instance where a Stanford student allegedly advocated for violence against President Biden, [9] an action some, like journalist Glenn Greenwald, denounced as a form of doxxing. [10] The article was criticized by others on the basis of its portrayal of student protestors, alleging a biased narrative ignoring islamophobia and the plight of Palestinians. [11] Jonathan Chait later published a piece in New York Magazine responding to this criticism, suggesting progressive attacks were motivated by viewpoint outside the mainstream and that critics were espousing "illiberal left-wing thought." [12]
In February 2023, The Stanford Daily received one of the 2022 George Polk Awards for its reporting on Tessier-Lavigne, the first time an independent, student-run newspaper has won the award. [13] [14] The Polk Awards gave Baker a "Special Award", making him the youngest ever Polk awardee. [1] [14] He has also received a James Madison Freedom of Information Award from the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. [2]
Baker is from the Washington, D.C., area [3] and is the son of journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. [15] He is a graduate of Phillips Academy Andover. [16]
Baker is often portrayed as a "nepo baby", benefitting from the status of his parents in the journalistic world. [17] He denounced the criticisms, saying while he was fortunate to have good role models, he strived to keep his parent's influence "entirely separate" from his reporting. [18] Baker told Teen Vogue that he had previously said he would never become a journalist but changed his mind to "feel connected to [his] late grandfather, who passed just two weeks before [he] started at Stanford, and who would always sit down and talk about his time doing student journalism." [19]
Stanford University is a private research university in Stanford, California. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford, the eighth governor of and then-incumbent senator from California, and his wife, Jane, in memory of their only child, Leland Jr. The university admitted its first students in 1891, opening as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. It struggled financially after Leland's death in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, university provost Frederick Terman inspired an entrepreneurial culture in order to build a self-sufficient local industry.
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Richard Priestley Lifton is an American biochemist and the 11th and current president of The Rockefeller University.
Susanne Craig is a Canadian investigative journalist who works at The New York Times. She was the reporter to whom Donald Trump's 1995 tax returns were anonymously mailed during the 2016 presidential election. In 2018, Craig was an author of The New York Times investigation into Donald Trump's wealth that found the president inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from his father, some through fraudulent tax schemes. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2019 for this coverage.
The Malheur Enterprise is a weekly newspaper in Vale, Oregon. It was established in 1909, and since October 2015 has been published by Malheur Enterprise Pub. Co. It is issued weekly on Wednesdays. Early on, it carried the title Malheur Enterprise and Vale Plaindealer. As of 2018 its circulation has been estimated at 1,207 to 1,277.
Susan B. Glasser is an American journalist and news editor. She writes the online column "Letter from Biden’s Washington" in The New Yorker, where she is a staff writer. She is the author, with her husband Peter Baker, of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution (2005), The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III (2020), and The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 (2022).
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Jews have faced antisemitism and discrimination in universities and campuses in the United States, from the founding of universities in the Thirteen Colonies until the present day in varying intensities. From the early 20th century, and until the 1960s, indirect quotas were placed on Jewish admissions, quotas were first placed on Jews by elite universities such Columbia, Harvard and Yale and were prevalent as late as the 1960s in universities such as Stanford. These quotas disappeared in the 1970s.
A special award was given to Theo Baker, a student at Stanford University and a reporter for The Stanford Daily, for uncovering allegations that some research papers co-written by Stanford University's president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, contained manipulated images. The university is now investigating the allegations. Mr. Baker, 18, is the son of two journalists — Peter Baker of The New York Times and Susan B. Glasser of The New Yorker, and is the youngest recipient of a Polk Award, according to Mr. Darnton.