William F. May: Upclose William May was born in Chicago and reared in Houston, Texas. He received a bachelor's of arts degree in 1948 from Princeton University, a bachelor's in divinity degree from Yale Divinity School in 1952, and a doctorate in religious studies from Yale in 1962. In 1966, May founded the religious studies program at Indiana University, and in 1969 the University converted it into a department. He continued to chair the department until 1976. May has taught at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., and at Indiana University in Bloomington. He held a chair at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University from 1980 to 1985, and from 1985 to 2001 he founded and directed the Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Since then May has been a visiting professor at Yale University and the University of Virginia. In 1993, he served on the Clinton Task Force on Health Care Reform, and from 2002 to 2004 on President Bush's Council on Bioethics. May has also written several books, including Beleaguered Rulers: The Public Obligation of the Professional, The Patient's Ordeal, and The Physician's Covenant: Images of the Healer in Medical Ethics. May and his wife, Beverly, have four children: two daughters who are physicians and two sons who are in business.

Perhaps he already knew it, but that summer he saw it clearly for the first time. He was 20, a recent college graduate, and living in southwest Oklahoma for a few months. One day his closest friend at the time, a Brazilian wheat harvester, asked him a profound question: "Bill, why is it in America that you give your streets numbers: 10th Avenue, 42nd Street, 55th, or name them after trees: Elm Street, Walnut, Sycamore, Oak Lawn. Don't you have any heroes in North America to name them after? Where have all your heroes gone?"

This event several decades ago inspired Dr. William F. May to contemplate why America has countless celebrities, but not many heroes to speak of. What has happened to our heroes and saints? Why don't we have leaders after which we can name our streets?

May, a widely-known medical ethicist, recalled this experience in his lecture titled, "Venturing beyond the limits of professionalism: Toward professional creativity." The lecture, held Oct. 19, 2004, in the Monsanto Auditorium of MU's Life Science Center, was the second in the 2004-2005 distinguished lecture series of the Center for Religion, the Professions and the Public.

May explored the roots and identity of the professional, and he challenged the ideas people have about society's expectations of the professional today. According to May, an excellent professional is one who pushes the envelope and lives with a vision of creativity.

"The very word creativity urges us to move beyond the ordinary to the extraordinary, from the routine to the exceptional, from the timorous to the heroic," May said. "It means taking risks, and taking risks takes guts, especially in the professions where almost all professional pressures operate to enforce routine behavior," he said.

In his own experiences as a professional, May has exhibited a lifestyle of risk-taking and creativity. His credentials include founding the religious studies program at Indiana University in 1966 (which became a department in 1969) and chairing it until 1976. May has also served as a founding fellow at the Hastings Center for Bioethics in Garrison, N.Y., and authored several books including Beleaguered Rulers: The Public Obligation of the Professional, The Patient's Ordeal, and The Physician's Covenant: Images of the Healer in Medical Ethics.

As May contemplated the roots of professionalism, he mentioned another situation that got him thinking. In 1990, Time chose Mikhail Gorbachev as the "Man of the Decade" instead of selecting a leader from the United States. During an appearance on the The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, the interviewer asked May and other guests why didn't the United States produce a comparable figure during the previous decade?

May said that former librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin offered his opinion: "Maybe we haven't produced charismatic or heroic leaders because the peculiar genius of our system is that we don't need them. As the founders put it, we're a government of laws, not of men. Didn't we go for a constitution, not a king?"

May said that America has depended on four basic governing mechanisms that "let the country function without demanding much virtue from its citizens." They are the U.S. Constitution, the marketplace, the large-scale organization and the modern university.

"Each of these mechanisms mobilizes the energy of self-interest and talent rather than asks us to make heroic sacrifices," he said.

May explained that the Constitution provided a federal system of divided powers and three distinct branches of government, which created a system of checks and balances. The government didn't have to put too much trust in the abilities of one individual or leader because there were enough people in power to divide the responsibilities among each other. Therefore, each person merely had to do his or her job.

"We didn't have to depend upon heroes," he said.

May said the second mechanism, the marketplace, has always appealed chiefly to self-interest and spared society the need to place heavy ethical or moral demands on people.

"Through marketplace exchanges, thousands of similarly self-interested parties enrich each other and contribute cumulatively to the wealth of the nation," May said, echoing the thoughts of economist Adam Smith. He noted that in commercial interactions, each party seeks business opportunities that are most beneficial for itself without much regard for the other competitors involved.

May said the third mechanism, the large-scale organization, "mobilizes professional skills and assembles them all together." He said that the modern corporation, which emerged out of marketplace competition, "doesn't usually ask for the heroic, but merely skilled performances from its members."

"It needs careerists," he said, "and it often finds extraordinary, maverick behavior rather disruptive and inconvenient." May said large-scale organizations usually prefer routinized and reliable workers to creative, spontaneous innovators. Such organizations focus on the efficiency of workers, avoiding errors, and increasing the bottom line. It takes time, energy and money to be creative in one's work.

The fourth and final mechanism on which Americans have depended is the modern university, May explained. He said that institutions of higher learning rarely offer moral instruction but instead provide students with specialized skills and book knowledge. According to May, the goal of the university is to help students obtain professional jobs in corporations that will compete effectively in the marketplace. And the cycle of seeking self-interest continues.

"So, who needs heroes?" May probed. "Why praise creative men and women? Aren't we better off relying wholly on mechanisms rather than people?"

May turned to the definition of professional identity to help answer that question.

"Three commitments distinguish a professional from a mere careerist," he said. "A professional must profess something (a body of knowledge or experience) on behalf of someone or something (person or institution) and undertake it in the presence of colleagues and society at large." That is, the professional is intellectual, moral, and organizational.

In addition to these commitments, May said the professional must possess three correlative virtues: practical wisdom (in applying a body of knowledge), fidelity (one's judgments ought to be disinterested), and public spiritedness (the art of acting in concert with others for the common good).

In Western culture, he said, the professions were a development of the aristocratic class. From the 17th century into the 20th century, the professions provided a respectable place for the second, third, and fourth sons of aristocrats who were not eligible to inherit their father's estate because of primogeniture.

"The professions now supply the social escalator that lifts sons and daughters upward from the working and middle classes—sons and daughters who often lack clear public identities and who need to earn their entire livings from their professions," May said.

He added that the modern pursuit of a career constitutes "a shift in orientation toward private welfare and happiness," rather than a responsibility to the public good.

So, does something nobler than personal success and achievement motivate the professional, or is it merely a pursuit of self-interest?

May said some people connect the word professions with a religious term: vocation or calling. In this call to discipleship in the professional world, people were summoned to perform tasks on behalf of their communities and for the benefit of everyone who lived there. An ancient example of this, May said, would be the prophets in the Bible who all emphasize the public character of their service to the people of Israel. A modern example is the way teachers and professors give so much of themselves to train and prepare future generations for work in the professions.

"Nobody in this room can go through a modern college or university and plausibly pretend to be a self-made man or self-made woman," May said. "A huge company of people contribute to the shaping of professionals," including janitors, kitchen workers, secretaries, administrators, and faculty, as well as community members who support education with their tax dollars. All of these people could consider their work to be a calling, for it benefits their communities.

May said he understands the difficulties of being a professional today. Oftentimes a company's emphasis on productivity or its obsession with profits can diminish the idea that the professions are a calling meant to benefit the public. But May isn't satisfied to let the marketplace crunch rule the behavior of professionals.

"The professions today need their heroes—creative folk who grew up within the limitations of a professional culture but who also stand out from it, recognizing the extraordinary," May said. "Extraordinary because they are willing to place themselves and sometimes their careers and their goods at some risk as they undergo an ordeal for the sake of a cause, a client, a patient, a reform that transcends them."

May said these kinds of men and women "enlarge us."

"We need not only minimal professional rules, but towering ideals that stretch us," he said. That is, people who will make "small sacrifices" for the good of their communities, nation, and world. At least, May said, we need "enough worthies to name our streets after."

Katie Bauer is a master's student at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Links in archives are not maintained.