On board the Elba Viking ship with my brother, some discussion of our time at Cornell University Medical College has been inevitable. He was 5 years ahead of me, and some of the faculty and graduates his of his class were still there when I arrived at the New York City school. Our class 50 year reunion is approaching and although I'm being more or less required to attend I intend to say nothing or as close to nothing as possible there.
But that does not mean I'll not be thinking about that experience.
Foremost in mind is Bertrand Russell's remark, "The trouble with life is, the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt." That certainly describes many of the students and faculty at CUMC. There were, to be sure, many brilliant folks, but they tended to be the quiet ones: Jerome Posner, neurology; Maria New and Julianne Imperato-McGuinley,pediatric endocrinology; whoever it was who taught our first year physiology course; Henry Masur, Charles Jarowski, my residents; Kathy Foley, my neurology chief resident.
In sum, I learned more the four years in college and certainly more the 50 years since medical school than I learned of enduring value at Cornell, but the four years in medical school were essential and necessary.
The annoying part of Cornell was it provided a home for people who thought they could substitute arrogance for erudition and get away with it. What they really taught me was that being in power did not mean you were either the best or the brightest. Many big organizations likely taught the same: the Army, the US Congress, scores of big businesses.
Cornell had too little real innovation--there were no Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page/Sergei Brin types there, people who changed the basic stratum on which life gets lived. The ethos there was not to question but to fall in line, and that does not advance knowledge very well.
Having said that, real innovators are rare and when I left Cornell for Yale School of Medicine, I found a few innovators, but the school and the hospital which supported it showed what happened when discipline and values of self sacrifice were too lax. Georgetown Medical School taught me what happened when the leaders at the very top were incompetent and the Brown Medical School taught me what a fledgling, underdeveloped school, newly hatched lacked.
So Cornell was good at what it did, but it suffered from a lack of true confidence. It was a place of posturing and pomp, but it managed to accrue the virtues of trying hard, maybe the vice of trying too hard, and in the end, it provided what it promised: a good start.
