Friends: Here is a brief article on heads of universities and their academic achievements as reflected by citations to their scholarly writings. In the West there is a good correlation. It will be interesting to see how many of our vice chancellors and directors of higher educational institutions (in India) have a good academic record. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] --- Citations make the president By Adam Marcus Amanda Goodall, a doctoral student in strategic management at Warwick Business School, UK, had a hunch, based on her experience working for college officials in both the United States and the United Kingdom: The world's elite research universities put a premium on naming elite researchers as their presidents. So she tallied all the citations amassed by presidents of the world's top 100 universities, as judged by the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University "probably the most reliable league table available," according to Goodall. Since university heads come from different disciplines with inherently different levels of expected output economics papers can take years to come out, while a productive microbiologist can easily have her name on a dozen papers in a year or more Goodall assigned each president a "normalized" citation score. That meant the Nobelist David Baltimore, president of sixth-ranked Caltech, who garnered 28,000-odd citations, earned a "president score" of 32.48. Lawyer Lee Bollinger of Columbia nee the University of Michigan, with a relatively modest list of 398, got a bit of a boost to a president score of 3.4. Among the top 20 schools in Shanghai rankings, Harvard University was first, and president Lawrence Summers also had the highest president score (36.02) with 6,088 citations. After that, the president score didn't predict placement precisely: Second was Stanford University, where president John Hennessy, a computer scientist, had 1986 citations and a president score of 23.64, far behind Caltech's Baltimore, who had the second-best president score. And while the University of California, San Francisco, placed 17th in the rankings, its chancellor J. Michael Bishop had the third-highest president score of 24.1. Rounding out the top 20 is the University of Washington's Mark A. Emmert, a social scientist, with 92 citations, which gave him a president score of 0.78. The overall findings, to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Documentation, showed a correlation between the number of citations racked up by university heads and the standing of the schools they lead but only in the United States. When the 51 US schools on the list of top 100 universities are excluded, "the correlation doesn't exist," says Goodall. Still, says Bruce Weinberg, a labor economist at Ohio State University, the finding is "unquestionably true." However, Weinberg says, "It is harder to show that the scholarly standing of the president affects the quality of the university." So if Harvard decided to hire a lightweight scholar, it's unlikely that the Crimson's reputation would bleed out. "Similarly, if an undistinguished university somehow hired a top researcher as a president, it probably would not immediately vault its way into the top ranks of universities," says Weinberg. Goodall acknowledges that her study doesn't say anything about why universities choose their leaders. They may pick top scientists as presidents as much as for their ability to separate big donors from their money as for their skill at splitting atoms. It's equally possible that great researchers are simply good at everything, including running a university, or that having papers with high impact is a proxy for crucial academic leadership skills. Then there's the matter of selection bias. Top-flight scholars probably avoid chiefships at schools they consider beneath them, says Charles Oppenheim, a professor of information sciences at the UK's Loughborough University, who has seen Goodall's research. And "as universities increasingly value business and entrepreneurial skills over research skills," Oppenheim adds, "This implies that in, say, 10 years' time, similar research would not produce as strong a correlation." For her part, Goodall doesn't believe being a heavily cited and therefore presumably skilled researcher is a proxy for being a strong leader; she's known too many lab heads who treated their underlings poorly. Hiring the former to head your institution, however, is a signal from the trustees to the faculty that research is the core concern, she says. "My extensive background in research contributes significantly both to my effectiveness as the president of a major research university and to my credibility as a leader in higher education," says Amy Guttmann (1388 citations, for a president score of 11.86), president of the University of Pennsylvania, which the Shanghai rankings had at number 15. "Having a scholar-teacher as president sends a signal that even fundraising is inseparable from academic content from knowing what the university actually doesand is not just about donor cultivation cultivation's for sake," she adds. Goodall is now looking at 55 UK schools and their leaders over a period of 15 to 20 years, focusing on institutions that have moved up or down in the rankings, and whether their heads have been strong or weak researchers. The point, she says, is to see whether "the research history of university presidents impacted the performance of the universities over time." She also plans to do a case study on the California university system. After learning so much about academic leadership, would Goodall ever want to take the reins of a school? Not a chance. "It's a pretty crappy job. I would not want to do it."