Student who brought down Stanford president lands book deal

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By Ian Mohr

He’s a chip off the ol’ book.

Theo Baker — the wunderkind college journalist whose reporting as a freshman led to the ouster of Stanford University’s president — has inked a book deal with Penguin Press, Page Six has learned.

Baker was reportedly hanging out in the Washington Post newsroom before he could even write as a toddler.

His parents are Susan Glasser, the New Yorker writer and a former WaPo editor, and Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for the NY Times.

A source told us Theo’s book will detail his freshman year and how his reporting for the school paper took down the institution’s head.

Baker’s investigation into a Bay Area biotech company, Genentech — where former Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne was a top exec — and alleged errors in its research led to Tessier-Lavigne stepping down at the storied school, but remaining on its faculty.

While his parents have been his mentors, Baker, a Phillips Academy Andover grad, told the Washington Post of his work, “They don’t read my copy before it goes out . . . They’re not my editors,” and credited the school paper.

He’d also told the outlet of being a campus newbie, “I was really scared, and I felt really alone,” and, “I just started at Stanford, and I was still trying to find my friends. It was a little weird when people would interrupt in the middle of class and be like, ‘Oh my God, you’re that kid!’ or come up to me when I’m trying to go to a party.”

The teen’s work won him a special George Polk Award for journalism.

Penguin confirmed the book, but didn’t provide further details. The imprint’s authors include Ron Chernow, Michael Pollan, David Axelrod, Zadie Smith, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Nate Silver and Mark Harris, among others.

Stanford’s board said last summer that a special committee “did not find evidence to conclude that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne personally engaged in research misconduct,” but that it, “did find evidence that some members of labs overseen by [Tessier-Lavigne] either engaged in inappropriate manipulation of research data or engaged in deficient scientific practices, resulting in significant flaws in those papers.”