GEOFF BENNETT: Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign next month over questionable handling of flawed scientific research.
The investigation started last year after the campus newspaper, The Stanford Daily, published allegations of research misconduct in past academic papers.
The findings cleared him of any misconduct, but found he was responsible for overseeing and correcting data manipulations and errors from other scientists in five papers he authored.
Theo Baker is the student journalist who first published those allegations back in November, and has been covering this for months.
Theo Baker, welcome to the "NewsHour."
THEO BAKER, The Stanford Daily: Thanks so much for having me and putting me on the show.
GEOFF BENNETT: Well, we appreciate that.
And we should say you are an 18-year-old rising sophomore.
You spent your freshman year as the investigations editor for the Stanford newspaper.
After just arriving on campus, how did you know to look into these allegations involving the university president?
What tipped you off?
THEO BAKER: Yes, so what's really interesting about the story, actually, is that, where we started, you could have started in 2015, if you knew where to look.
There were already musings on scientific forums by anonymous commenters that suspected Photoshopping and alteration of figures in papers that Tessier-Lavigne had published throughout his career.
I think the earliest one was published six years before I was born.
So what we did is, we took those allegations, which had never been reported, never really been analyzed, we took them to forensic image analysts.
We reported them out.
We verified them.
And that's where we started our investigation.
We started with good old-fashioned open-source journalism.
GEOFF BENNETT: And this was over the course of a year?
THEO BAKER: So that investigation published in November, in mid-November.
And the first story involved about four papers.
Eventually, we published stories about 12 papers with different sorts of allegations inside.
Obviously, five of those papers are ones where Tessier-Lavigne Tessier-Lavigne is the principal author, and which he obviously bears the principal authority on the data.
The results of this report have just concluded that Tessier-Lavigne must retract or issue at least lengthy corrections to those five papers.
And they found that he oversaw a lab culture that consistently produced fraudulent results, and that he consistently failed to avail himself of opportunities to correct the scientific record, despite being made aware over the course of 20 years of different allegations over his papers.
GEOFF BENNETT: And, to your point, your reporting prompted the Stanford Board of Trustees to launch an independent investigation that led to those findings.
What's been the reaction among the Stanford community to your reporting and to the resignation?
THEO BAKER: Yes, I mean, I think everyone is talking about this.
Obviously, Stanford is a research institution, first and foremost.
It spends more than a billion dollars a year on research.
So to have a president who's accused of research misconduct, it does make it hard to lead.
And that's something that Tessier-Lavigne and the board eventually agreed to when he announced his resignation just yesterday.
For months, Tessier-Lavigne had said that these allegations did not affect his ability to lead.
But, eventually, it seems he was persuaded otherwise.
Obviously, I think a lot of people are concerned about the culture that was identified in the report.
It remains to be seen exactly how the community takes it.
Obviously, we're on summer break, so they waited to release this report until people were not on campus.
But we will see what in the fall how people feel about our interim president, and then whoever they pick to replace Tessier-Lavigne.
GEOFF BENNETT: Through your reporting, you took on your university president.
You held your university accountable.
How does it feel knowing that your reporting and that your journalism has this significant impact?
THEO BAKER: Well, I think the most gratifying thing for me, as a student journalist and someone in the position that I'm in, is to feel like I have been able to contribute to the correction of the scientific record.
That's something I think is very important.
I think it's been made pretty clear by this report that these five papers that are now going to be corrected or retracted by Tessier-Lavigne would not have been done so had we not started asking questions.
So it feels good, because these are widely cited papers that have had a major impact.
And for the scientific record to be made more pure is -- as a result of our reporting, that feels good.
GEOFF BENNETT: As you well know, there's a college newspaper investigation at Northwestern that resulted in the football coach there being fired over hazing allegations.
What do you view as the role of student journalism?
THEO BAKER: I'm so proud to belong to this community.
I will fight for it constantly.
I knew going into this that I enjoyed local journalism and student journalism, but now, being in the thick of it, I'm just so proud of my peers.
I know that people across the country are making the difficult decision to report on people inside their own community, in some cases like ours, on people who have direct control over them.
And they're making that decision because they care about their communities, because people who are inside their communities will always push for transparency because they love it.
Student journalism is hard.
It's unsung work.
Often, people are not credited.
Certainly, they're not paid.
And so to see the work that my peers across the country are doing, including at Northwestern, but also The Crimson, where they published stories over $188,000 that went missing from a student club, or at The Columbia Daily Spectator, where they published stories about a toxic workplace environment that got stiff blowback from the university before it was published, to see them doing that is really inspirational.
And I'm so glad that student journalism is being talked about on the national stage.
GEOFF BENNETT: Lastly, Theo, have you settled on a major yet?
Will journalism figure in your future?
THEO BAKER: You know, Stanford actually doesn't even have journalism majors.
So, even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to.
But I have not decided on a major.
I have been a little distracted.
(LAUGHTER) GEOFF BENNETT: A little distracted.
Theo Baker, thanks so much for your time.
We appreciate it.
THEO BAKER: Thank you.
Thank you very much.
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