Michael Hyde is the distinguished professor of communication ethics, within the department of communication at the university and holds a joint appointment in the Program in Bioethics, Health, and Society at the  School of Medicine. He says his latest book, Perfection: Coming to Terms with Being Human, which was published this month by Baylor University Press, offers a critical assessment of how we human beings embody a metaphysical desire for perfection, achieving a state of completeness in our lives whereby, at least for the moment, we feel secure, comfortable and at home with ourselves, others, and our immediate surroundings.

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“We are creatures who are fated to struggle with the ever-present challenge of ‘getting things right,’ ‘making things better,’ ‘improving ourselves,’ and being as complete as we can be as we grow, mature, and become wise with experience,” Hyde said.

“I am especially interested in how human communication and the practice of rhetoric play a role in meeting this challenge: in coming to terms with perfection,” he said.

His latest book on perfection is the third part of a trilogy.  The first two books in the trilogy are The Call of Conscience: Heidegger and Levinas and Rhetoric and The Euthanasia Debate and The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment.

“Sometimes we end up being rotten with imperfection. Other times the result is that of being rotten with perfection.  We need to avoid both of these extremes for the sake of our well-being,” Hyde said.

Hyde has previously taught at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and at Northwestern University. He received his bachelors at the University of Pittsburgh and his doctorate at Purdue University.

Since arriving in 1994, he has served as a board member of the Judicial Council, the Honor and Ethics Council, the Capital Planning Committee and the Bioethics Task Force.

He has also lectured throughout the United States and at the London School of Economics on Wake Forest’s Technology Initiative.

He is the author of over 60 articles and critical reviews appearing in various scholarly journals and texts.

He has also additionally published six books, Communication Philosophy and the Technological Age, The Ethos of Rhetoric, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in our Time, The Call of Conscience:  Heidegger and Levinas, Rhetoric and The Euthanasia Debate, The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment and Perfection: Coming to Terms with Being Human.

Hyde is teaching a new course titled “The Ethics of Health Communication” for a new masters program at the university and the course is receiving much anticipation.

“I also serve as a thesis director for the graduate students and an advisor for planning the program’s activities, especially as they promote the University’s Center for Bioethics, Health, and Society,” he said. This semester he is currently teaching a graduate course in rhetorical criticism, an undergraduate and graduate course in Semantics and “Language in Communication.”

So far in his career he has been the recipient of 13 assorted awards for teaching excellence. Hyde is a Fellow of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and a recipient of national, state and university research grants for his work in the rhetoric of medicine.