From curmudgeon to cowboys and commencement

The best lines I read today are from this rather polemic op-ed by the curmudgeonly Harvey Mansfield:

A graduate student in sociology is one who didn't get his fill of jargonized wishful thinking as an undergraduate. Such a person will never fail to disappoint you. But sociology has close competitors in other social sciences (including mine, political science) and in the humanities.

With all his writing on manliness and gripes about a feminized culture, Mansfield does come across at times, if not all the time, as an academic cowboy of sorts.  Atul Gawande uses the same cowboy metaphor, but in a completely different way in his commencement address to the graduating class of Harvard's medical students.  Even if I were not the Gawande fan that I am, well, it is a kind of commencement address that makes a lot of sense.  Speaking about the changes in the medical profession over the last couple of generations, and the spiraling cost of healthcare, Gawande notes that "We train, hire, and pay doctors to be cowboys. But it’s pit crews people need."

The metaphor is easy to grasp--we have seen how fast and efficient the pit crew people work, and work as a team.  We imagine the cowboy to be a lonely horseback rider herding cattle.  And then Gawande concludes with this:

Recently, you might be interested to know, I met an actual cowboy. He described to me how cowboys do their job today, herding thousands of cattle. They have tightly organized teams, with everyone assigned specific positions and communicating with each other constantly. They have protocols and checklists for bad weather, emergencies, the inoculations they must dispense. Even the cowboys, it turns out, function like pit crews now. It may be time for us to join them.

To some extent, the old-fashioned academe too used to function like pit crews more than as cowboys.  But, the rapid and over-specialization of academics even at teaching universities like mine has transformed faculty into pedantic cowboys, I suppose.