Congratulations on the book Glenn, I loved reading it and was honored to have a blurb on the jacket. I think it's noteworthy that of the six jacket reviews only one (Shelby Steele) comes from a conservative. This speaks to the breadth of your reach. The book will mean different things to different people, there is even something there for game theorists. I'm sure it will be a huge success.
On Claudine Gay, I agree with John that even boilerplate plagiarism is an intoleratable offense for a Harvard president. But I also think that she has been treated with extreme cruelty and contempt. She had single authored papers in each of the top three political science journals at the time of tenure, and her citation record compared favorably to all recent Harvard presidents at the time of appointment, except Summers who was an outlier. Yet people (including you and John) describe her academic record as thin, as if it is somehow unusual among university presidents. What is the empirical basis for this claim? I don't see it. So I do think she has reason to feel aggreived. Just my two cents.
My point, Rajiv, is that the "boilerplate" plagiarism betrays a lack of intellectual heft that is unbecoming in a president of Harvard University... Thanks for kind words about my book. It was written, in part, with you game theorists in mind!
Maybe so Glenn, but consider the possibility that there was no plagiarism in this case. Would her academic record have then been treated as respectable relative to others similarly placed? Or would it still have been characterized as "thin" without any attempt to look at citations or journal rankings?Was Lawrence Bacaw ever described in this way? The records are comparable, at least on standard metrics, and on some dimensions Gay's is superior. I find this troubling.
For some reason I assumed that most presidents at elite universities were towering intellectual giants in terms of their academic output, so I was definitely interested to learn that people like Lawrence Bacow didn't exactly blow away the academic world either.
To be fair though, despite having similar h-indexes, Bacow does have something like 10x the citation count of Gay correct? I know you're comparing their academic outputs at the time of appointment, but an article I read from a while back pointed out that at that point in time at least, Bacow had over 2,500 citations compared to only around 170 for Gay. Likewise Drew Faust has written a number of books while Gay has never authored any from what I understand.
That being said, I do agree that maybe some of the criticism of Gay has been a bit on the harsh side given what I now know about the the academic bona fides of people like Bacow, etc.
Fun fact, according to Google Scholar Glenn Loury has a slightly lower h-index than John McWhorter despite having more than 2x the number of raw citations, so obviously the h-index calculation doesn't correlate perfectly with number of citations, something which I wasn't aware of.
Yan, Gay has well over 2500 citations. Her two most influential papers have over 500 each. This is the point I was trying to make. People should at least make the comparison.
Ah I see. That's helpful to know because it appears that Google Scholar has removed their link to Claudine Gay's body of work, so I was only operating from a previous article I read online that suggested Bacow had amassed over 2,500 citations at that point in time compared to only 170 or so for Gay.
I see that Bacow now has over 2,700 citations so if Gay's lifetime citation count is over 2,500 and their h-indexes are similar then I definitely agree that you have a point there. As a non-academic I sort of assumed that all the elite university presidents were like Larry Summers, but as you point out he was a statistical outlier even among recent Harvard presidents.
Yes Summers was unusual among recent Harvard presidents. Sally Kornbluth at MIT has over 14K, so well ahead of the typical president. This is one reason she will survive the attempts to topple her.
Citations are a very crude measure, just a first step really, but people should at least start there.
Rajiv, you've read these papers, I presume. "Thin" is an appropriate evaluation in my view. Your counter-factual of no plagiarism isn't relevant. We wouldn't be here without the plagiarism. And I'm told she won't provide her data to people who want to replicate some of her findings... Etc.
No of course I haven't read the papers Glenn. I can't vouch for their quality. Same goes for the papers of her predecessors. All I can do is to see if the same standard is being applied. It does not appear to me that it is.
One doesn't have to disparage her scholarship to object to her presidency, there are plenty of other reasons to do so. Hypocrisy around free speech for instance, and the treatment of Fryer and Sullivan. And the plagiarism of course.
I'm not saying that the work is path-breaking or profound, just that it is comparable to many other presidents at time of appointment, including transformational and highly paid presidents such as John Silber at BU. People are arguing that the scholarship did not merit appointment, and doing so without proper empirical backing. Note that appointment was made before the plagiarism issues surfaced so this cannot have been a factor. Hence my hypothetical.
Congratulations on the book Glenn, I loved reading it and was honored to have a blurb on the jacket. I think it's noteworthy that of the six jacket reviews only one (Shelby Steele) comes from a conservative. This speaks to the breadth of your reach. The book will mean different things to different people, there is even something there for game theorists. I'm sure it will be a huge success.
On Claudine Gay, I agree with John that even boilerplate plagiarism is an intoleratable offense for a Harvard president. But I also think that she has been treated with extreme cruelty and contempt. She had single authored papers in each of the top three political science journals at the time of tenure, and her citation record compared favorably to all recent Harvard presidents at the time of appointment, except Summers who was an outlier. Yet people (including you and John) describe her academic record as thin, as if it is somehow unusual among university presidents. What is the empirical basis for this claim? I don't see it. So I do think she has reason to feel aggreived. Just my two cents.
My point, Rajiv, is that the "boilerplate" plagiarism betrays a lack of intellectual heft that is unbecoming in a president of Harvard University... Thanks for kind words about my book. It was written, in part, with you game theorists in mind!
Maybe so Glenn, but consider the possibility that there was no plagiarism in this case. Would her academic record have then been treated as respectable relative to others similarly placed? Or would it still have been characterized as "thin" without any attempt to look at citations or journal rankings?Was Lawrence Bacaw ever described in this way? The records are comparable, at least on standard metrics, and on some dimensions Gay's is superior. I find this troubling.
For some reason I assumed that most presidents at elite universities were towering intellectual giants in terms of their academic output, so I was definitely interested to learn that people like Lawrence Bacow didn't exactly blow away the academic world either.
To be fair though, despite having similar h-indexes, Bacow does have something like 10x the citation count of Gay correct? I know you're comparing their academic outputs at the time of appointment, but an article I read from a while back pointed out that at that point in time at least, Bacow had over 2,500 citations compared to only around 170 for Gay. Likewise Drew Faust has written a number of books while Gay has never authored any from what I understand.
That being said, I do agree that maybe some of the criticism of Gay has been a bit on the harsh side given what I now know about the the academic bona fides of people like Bacow, etc.
Fun fact, according to Google Scholar Glenn Loury has a slightly lower h-index than John McWhorter despite having more than 2x the number of raw citations, so obviously the h-index calculation doesn't correlate perfectly with number of citations, something which I wasn't aware of.
Yan, Gay has well over 2500 citations. Her two most influential papers have over 500 each. This is the point I was trying to make. People should at least make the comparison.
Ah I see. That's helpful to know because it appears that Google Scholar has removed their link to Claudine Gay's body of work, so I was only operating from a previous article I read online that suggested Bacow had amassed over 2,500 citations at that point in time compared to only 170 or so for Gay.
I see that Bacow now has over 2,700 citations so if Gay's lifetime citation count is over 2,500 and their h-indexes are similar then I definitely agree that you have a point there. As a non-academic I sort of assumed that all the elite university presidents were like Larry Summers, but as you point out he was a statistical outlier even among recent Harvard presidents.
Yes Summers was unusual among recent Harvard presidents. Sally Kornbluth at MIT has over 14K, so well ahead of the typical president. This is one reason she will survive the attempts to topple her.
Citations are a very crude measure, just a first step really, but people should at least start there.
Thank you for your comments.
Rajiv, you've read these papers, I presume. "Thin" is an appropriate evaluation in my view. Your counter-factual of no plagiarism isn't relevant. We wouldn't be here without the plagiarism. And I'm told she won't provide her data to people who want to replicate some of her findings... Etc.
No of course I haven't read the papers Glenn. I can't vouch for their quality. Same goes for the papers of her predecessors. All I can do is to see if the same standard is being applied. It does not appear to me that it is.
One doesn't have to disparage her scholarship to object to her presidency, there are plenty of other reasons to do so. Hypocrisy around free speech for instance, and the treatment of Fryer and Sullivan. And the plagiarism of course.
I'm not saying that the work is path-breaking or profound, just that it is comparable to many other presidents at time of appointment, including transformational and highly paid presidents such as John Silber at BU. People are arguing that the scholarship did not merit appointment, and doing so without proper empirical backing. Note that appointment was made before the plagiarism issues surfaced so this cannot have been a factor. Hence my hypothetical.