 Thank you. Speaker, Dr. Richard Gunderman. Richard is the Chancellor Professor of Radiology, Pediatrics, Medical Education, Philosophy, Liberal Arts, Philanthropy, Medical Humanities, and Health Studies at Indiana University. I think you win in the number of departments that you sit in. He received his A.B. summa cum laude from Wabash College, and his M.D. and Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought here at the University of Chicago. He also received an M.P.H. from Indiana University. He is a nine-time recipient of the Alpha Omega Alpha Robert J. Glazer Award in Teaching Excellence at the University of Indiana. And he is the author of over 430 articles and has published eight books, including We Make a Life by What We Give, Leadership in Health Care, Achieving Excellence in Medical Education, X-ray Vision, and Essential Radiology. He is also past president of the Faculty at Indiana University School of Medicine and a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. Please welcome Dr. Gunderman. Thanks. It's a real treat to be here. Thanks a lot, Mark, for the chance to speak with everybody. I know I'm echoing everyone else's sentiments when I say, my spirit is singing to be with you today. And it's a privilege to see so many old friends. Who's that? Anybody know Bill and Ted and their excellent adventure? Socrates, yes, Socrates. That's absolutely right. From Raphael's The School of Athens, that's Socrates. And you can't give an intelligible talk, at least with my background, on education and ethics without at least nodding to Socrates. But I actually want to nod to another figure on Raphael's The School of Athens. Who's that? The model, of course, for this figure was the great sculptor and painter Michelangelo. Who is this? One of the most important so-called pre-Socratic philosophers. You know you've really arrived when people refer to your forerunners as pre-you. He's one of the pre-Socratic philosophers named Heraclitus. And once some foreign dignitaries came to visit Heraclitus in hopes that he would impart his wisdom, but they found him in the kitchen, warming himself by a stove. And Heraclitus said, come in. There are gods even here. So instead of talking about Athens, or the August halls of the University of Chicago, I want to talk about something. And someone considerably more modest, but I think ultimately no less illuminating, whose life experience may have some important lessons for us as people interested in ethics education. I'll identify this man as Derek. And he's a faculty member at an institution of higher education somewhere in the United States of America. Derek was born in a small town of about 50 people near Northfield, Minnesota. What two institutions of higher education are there? St. Olaf and Carlton, right. And this small town only has a population of about 50 people, but incredibly over its life it has produced two road scholars. And I think the reason is it's populated with farmers, but a particular type of farmer who when winter comes, reads lustily. And a community like that can do great things. Derek was a high school student who had a terrific teacher in chemistry. And one day he went to a church-sponsored meeting where they were addressed by a Tanzanian medical missionary doctor, who's this by the way? Now this would be Gabon, but this of course is Albert Schweitzer. And because of that contact with that charismatic individual, Derek decided to pursue a career in medicine. And he was a pre-medical student. Anybody remember Lewis Thomas' essay, How to Fix the Pre-Medical Curriculum? It's reprinted in the Medusa and the Snail. What does Thomas suggest we need to do to fix pre-medical education? Immediately bar anyone who self-designates as pre-medical from consideration for admission. So Derek is doing what all good pre-med students do, majoring in one of the natural sciences, in this case chemistry. He's earning very good grades. He will eventually graduate with highest honors. And his score on the medical college admissions test is outstanding. But Derek doesn't love pre-medical studies. Derek feels like somebody playing the wrong sport. So as you might guess, Derek has accepted into medical school. But like so many graduates or near graduates, he's having difficulty sleeping because he's not sure he's on the right path. Nothing seems right about his plan for his life. And here's a sense in which ethics bleeds into vocation. Not just who we are or who we're called to become, but what calling we strive to answer over the course of our professional and perhaps personal lives. So oddly enough, and I don't think this is a coincidence, Derek has managed to accumulate, as if by accident, all the courses necessary to be a double major in chemistry and religion. But he can't bring himself to admit that he might be on the right track. And overflowing with the kind of existential angst many of us remember from our own undergraduate days, he decides to see his religion professor, I think because he thinks a religion professor might have the inside track on vocation. So in this building on the second floor, he shows up at 7 a.m. one morning intending to camp out outside the professor's office and wait for him to arrive. But in fact, he's quite surprised to discover that when he arrives at 7 a.m., the professor is already there. And this is that professor, I'll call him Bill. Bill sees Derek at the doorway and asks him, what's the matter? You look trouble. And of course, that's an accurate diagnosis, right? Derek is indeed trouble. He's succeeding. He's on a path to gain admission to one of the nation's prestigious medical schools. He's on a path to graduate with high honors. His career prospects look extraordinarily bright. And yet, he is trouble. And Derek says to Bill, his professor, I have something to say, I have never told anyone. Do you have something you need to say that you've never told anyone? And if so, what is it? Well, Derek is about to get his chance to say just that. And he tells this religion professor, I don't think I want to become a doctor. And he experiences a sensation you perhaps know as well, a feeling as though a very heavy weight was lifted instantaneously off of his chest. Merely uttering this declaration is a tremendous relief to him. So he's looking at his professor. He says, I don't think I want to be a doctor. Bill responds, yeah, I know. Derek says, I think maybe I want to go to seminary or perhaps divinity school. Bill the professor responds, yeah, I know. Derek says, I think I may want to become a Lutheran pastor. Bill the professor responds, yeah, I know. As you can imagine, this is a rather disconcerting experience for 21 year old Derek, who didn't expect the conversation to go in this direction at all. In fact, he thought his religion professor would try to talk him out of his uncertainty about a career in medicine and urge him to go on to become a physician. So Derek's pretty exasperated at this point. He says, what do you mean you know? How long have you known this? Bill the professor responds, since I met you, is there anybody in this room or in this world who's known you since they met you? Is there anyone in this room or this world whom you've known since you met them? I mean, do you have that kind of power of discernment? To what degree is that power of discernment characteristic of someone who could claim to know something about ethics? Is it enough to know about situations and dilemmas or does it require us to know something about human beings, the human spirit, and in particular, human vocation? So Derek naturally responds, why didn't you tell me? I mean, if you've known this since you met me as a college freshman, why didn't you let me in on the secret a long time ago? You can imagine what Bill the professor's answer will be. You had to find it for yourself. Is this good teaching? To let an idea, perhaps an ill-formed idea to gestate for as long as three and a half years and then only to comment when prompted? So Bill the professor does something quite extraordinary. He reaches into his desk drawer and removes an envelope. Do you recognize this image? It's from one of the first ever detective stories. It's of course from Edgar Allen posed the perloined letter. The idea is there's a letter that contains compromising information. It's held by a criminal mastermind who will surely think of the cleverest, most undiscoverable place to hide it. But of course it emerges at the end of the story that the letter has been sitting on the desk in plain sight all along. What's been sitting on our desks in plain sight all along? Well, Bill the professor reaches into his drawer and pulls out this envelope and on the envelope is written one word, Nelson, which happens to be Derek's last name. And in that envelope are four partially completed applications to the top U.S. divinity schools. Derek looks at what's in his hands. He stunned initially and then he says, oh, this is incredible, but I noticed two of the deadlines have already passed. I'm not eligible to be considered for admission at these two schools. What will I do in the year I have to wait before my application can be considered? Bill the professor responds, it's okay. I called them, they're saving a place for you. Is this ethics? Nobody's dying, right? There's no genetic proteomic research taking place here. I mean, this is just some lowly undergraduate trying to figure out what career to pursue. This isn't gonna make it into the Hastings Center report or something like this. This can't really be ethics, can it? But that's what Bill the professor says. They are saving a place for you because I called them. And Derek ends up at that place. Do you recognize it? It's Yale Divinity School. Derek says, Bill the professor knew me better than I knew myself. The first day I arrived at Yale Divinity School, I knew I was where I belonged. That was Bill the professor. Here's Bill the professor talking about his most important teacher. It was simply that our teacher had the most interesting mind we'd ever encountered. Reading good books in his company, we thought about questions we'd never considered before. We kept seeing new connections. He seemed to have read everything and he made it all seem so fascinating that we wanted to alert read everything too. But it wasn't just that we sat back and watched his mind work, though that would have been marvelous fun. He wouldn't let us do that. He kept taking our ideas more seriously than we did ourselves. He kept taking us more seriously than we did ourselves. It was hard to be trivial in his company and mostly we had been trivial, so we started to change. What a beautiful description of an ethics educator. And here's Derek's description of his ethics educator, who's Bill the professor, whose photo you see here. He was so invested in his students, he invariably gave back papers the next class with extensive comments. He was so attuned to us. He was so patient with us and he knew the path was not his but mine. A description of an ethics educator. Bill died in 2010. And after he died, Derek and a number of others expressed what a shock it was to learn how many students and colleagues he had led to feel they were his first priority. Students at the institution, colleagues at the institution, and in fact, colleagues all over the United States felt that they were somehow his first priority. Here's the most intelligent and best educated occupant of the White House in history, who's that? The first president to be photographed, who's that? Yeah, it's John Quincy Adams, whose grandson writes in the second best non-fiction book of the 20th century, The Education of Henry Adams. A teacher affects eternity. No one can tell where his influence stops. So one day Bill, the now deceased professor, was giving the commencement address at his undergraduate institution. And for decades after that, he reported remembering, looking out from the podium at a beautiful tree by one of the classroom buildings and seeing it vividly in bloom. The odd thing about that is that graduation takes place in May and that tree only blooms in October. Now to some of us, that's a clear indication of the faultiness of human memory, but to others it might mean something different or at least point in a quite different direction. So Derek had the opportunity, was asked by a publisher to revise Bill the professor's first book called A History of Christian Theology. And he undertook that task and found it very difficult in part because in the 30 years that it elapsed, a good bit of research had been done on the Dead Sea Scrolls and he found himself asking, what would Bill say about the Dead Sea Scrolls? And he actually found himself in conversation with Bill. There's the School of Athens. Who are we in conversation with? What larger community of discourse are we a part of? You can see Heraclitus there in the foreground. Come in, there are gods even here. So Derek is up late one night at midnight in his kitchen talking with Bill, who's deceased, about how to solve the riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their role in that history of Christian theology. And the conversation's going nowhere. Derek finally throws up his hands in frustration. He says, it's midnight, I've had enough, I'm hungry, I'm gonna fix a bowl of soup. And I'll conclude with this rather extraordinary observation. After Derek got done fixing that soup, he looked down and discovered to his surprise that he had in fact fixed two bowls. And that's where education and ethics butts up against and perhaps bleeds imperceptibly into eternity. Thanks very much. Thank you, that was really beautiful. I guess in hearing that story, I can't help but think about the wish that we all have to have a really wonderful Bill who can tell us exactly where to go and what to do. But I also think that it speaks to the willingness to have conversations as educators that may have alleviated some of Derek's suffering earlier than three years into the process. For example, for the past many years, I've been hosting a workshop called, I think I'm in the wrong movie. What if I don't want to be a doctor? And every year I'm amazed at how many medical students come to have that conversation from across all four years and how amid their peers, they are able for the first time often to say, this may not be the right thing for me. In the fourth year capstone course, we've offered a session where we talk about what happens if you don't want to be a doctor? You've matched into residency, you've started, what happens if along the way you decide this isn't right for me? Are you up a creek? Is there nothing else you can do? Or are there things that you've learned about yourself from this experience that actually may lead you toward a more authentic choice? And it circles back for me this notion of process versus endpoint that I think really is at the crux of ethics education and at the crux of what we try to do as educators, but that is bombarded by the pressures of time and energy that so many of our physician educators face and is underpinning this notion of can we change character? Which really is about both the willingness of the character to change and the education of process that allows for room for change. So embedded in all that is a question. How do we create that conversation so that maybe for those people who don't have a bill, who knows exactly who they are and what they should do, they can figure it out for themselves in a way that's integral to the process of their education. The Chicago has reached that point. Some costs of pursuing a career in medicine are probably so great that they rehabilitate this change in career course. And that makes me think of the fact that I think of the discussion around vocation and professions as degenerated to the point today will be very often understood strictly in terms of career. The question is not, do I want to become a doctor? Or what kind of doctor do I want to be? Internist, surgeon, pediatrician. The real question in my mind is, what kind of a doctor do I want to be? To what degree will the pursuit of a career in medicine or law teaching afford an opportunity to express my capacities to the fullest degree and more importantly make the greatest contribution to the lives of those I serve? And I think we could rejigger undergraduate education in such a way that we could invite those conversations almost from day one and certainly visit them on a frequent basis. But I think Lewis Thomas was on to something when he said the pre-meds are disqualified. The real purpose of undergraduate education is not to gain admission to any particular type of professional school, it's to become a human being. Let me quote a fellow Hoosier, the greatest coach there ever was. I mean, that's true. USA, sorry, the Sporting News, ESPN and Sports Illustrated all agree that this person is the greatest coach ever. His second greatest player, Bill Walton, once said, coach never talked about basketball. He never talked about diagramming plays or strategy or statistics like shooting percentage or the number of rebounds a player picked up in a game. Coach talked about one thing, that was life. Specifically, he talked about what it takes to become a good person because he believed that if we became better people, we'd have a chance of becoming good basketball players. Until we become good people, we don't have a chance of becoming good doctors and the conversation I think at colleges and universities should be focused around what really makes human beings admirable. And I'm delighted to have had the opportunity to share with you today a portrait in miniature of one of the human beings in my life I've found to be most admirable, namely, Bill the Professor. Thanks a lot.