"The Embodiment of Academic Freedom": A Tribute to Bill Murphy

One of the great figures of labor law, Bill Murphy of UNC Law, died this past September at the age of 87.  Although Bill was a well-known arbitrator and former president of the National Academy of Arbitrators, he was also known for being a thorn in the side to Mississippi segregationists in the 50's and 60's.

In this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, Eric Muller, also of UNC Law, pays tribute to this great man. Here are some highlights:

Bill Murphy, my colleague on the faculty of the University of North Carolina School of Law and my friend, died on September 29 in Chapel Hill at the age of 87. His life and his work could serve as an example of many of our highest aspirations: erudition, passion, civility, and engagement in both the worlds of ideas and action. But in the days since he died, I've been thinking most about how Bill's life and work exemplify the value of academic freedom . . . .

Yes, powerful men in Mississippi went after Bill Murphy while he was at Ole Miss in the 1950s because he was a member of the ACLU. But that masked their real reason: Bill Murphy was a professor of constitutional law who refused to teach budding Mississippi lawyers that Brown v. Board of Education was an illegitimate ruling that should be resisted. That was their real gripe . . . .

Up until the very end, Bill remained keenly interested in goings-on in the worlds of law and politics. One of my sweetest memories of Bill is of him at a luncheon table, a seat away from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas had come to UNC to deliver a talk at the law school. Some of my colleagues chose to stay away in protest — a position I certainly understood — but that was not Bill's style. In my memory, Bill is leaning intently toward Justice Thomas, pressing the jurist to defend his cramped understanding of federal power and his expansive vision of states' rights. Bill is questioning Justice Thomas with the gracious style of a southern gentleman and the intensity of a prosecutor on cross-examination. Justice Thomas is rocking slightly back in his chair, a strained smile on his face. Bill Murphy, forced out of Ole Miss at the point of a stick bearing the paired labels of "white supremacy" and "state sovereignty," could not quite get his mind around an African-American justice's eager endorsement of the power of the states.

Like Eric, I believe that the academy and the labor law community has lost a prince of a man. And like Eric, "[i]f life ever deals me a chance to show the courage of my convictions, as it twice did Bill, I hope I will do it with [Bill]'s silent guidance and blessing."

PS