Two stories this week arrive at the university from opposite angles and reach incompatible conclusions. Bloomberg flagged Theo Baker's new book on Silicon Valley's grip on higher education, while The Atlantic argued that something is genuinely going right at universities if you are willing to look past the headlines. The tension between these two readings is the actual story.
Who Funded the Campus That Raised You
Baker's thesis, based on his reporting on the tech industry's educational investment strategy, is that Silicon Valley has been conducting a long-horizon acquisition of American intellectual infrastructure. Endowment gifts, named buildings, curriculum partnerships, and accelerator pipelines have steadily converted research universities into talent funnels for a handful of companies. This is not a conspiracy. It is a structural outcome of the funding model. TurboFund's guide to the top US accelerators maps exactly how deep this pipeline runs from campus to cap table. A 2020 paper in Higher Education by Slaughter and Rhoades documented how corporate research partnerships systematically shift university research priorities away from public goods toward commercially viable applications.
What Is Actually Going Right, and for Whom
The Atlantic's optimism is not wrong, exactly. There are genuine pockets of intellectual vitality on campuses, particularly in humanities departments that have been insulated from the innovation economy pressure precisely because no one wanted to fund them. The irony is that the parts of campus most praised for going right may be the parts least touched by Silicon Valley money. The New Yorker's review of tech-bro satire notes that 2026 audiences find these critiques familiar but still hungry for the specific details the mainstream has missed. Theo Baker's book may be offering exactly that.