On 8 April 2013, two days after I paid a deposit confirming my intent to enrol as a freshman at Stanford University, the New Yorker ran a blog post headlined ‘The End of Stanford?’ In the article, the writer, Nicholas Thompson, suggested that, as its professors and students grew ever more obsessed with forming and funding startups, the university now looked like ‘a giant tech incubator with a football team’.

Stanford continued, becoming in the next decade ever more intertwined with Silicon Valley, at the centre of which the university sits, geographically and emotionally. Its endowment swelled, even as scandals – including the frauds of Stanford affiliates Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried – tainted the reputation of the region. In 2023, the president of Stanford departed after accusations that he had presided over fraudulent research in his biology labs. He is – in part – the subject of undergraduate student Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World. I never graduated from Stanford; Baker is set to do so this month.

Stanford’s campus – lush with palm trees, dappled in sunshine – is a short bike ride away from the top venture capital offices. For students who wish to become tech lords, this is an advantageous set-up. Such young people are wooed by investors, trained in software development and ‘management science’