The Rise of the Fraud Economy

Parenti reviews Theo Baker's account of the Stanford undergraduate who exposed his own university president's scientific fraud, and uses it to make a larger argument: that fraud has become structural in elite American institutions. When a school surrounds ordinary student life with compliance rituals that everyone understands to be theater, it is running a four-year training program in saying what is required and understanding none of it. Students take this lesson into laboratories, boardrooms, and eventually university presidencies. Click here to read the article.