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.
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.