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Roland E. Murphy, O. Carm., feminist mentor: rightly did the maidens love him
Biblical Theology Bulletin, Fall, 2003 by Carole R. Fontaine
As a woman scholar with no particular interest in banging the drum of essentialist womanhood in my work, I think one of the things I appreciated most as a woman about Roland's mentoring was his genuine surprise at the sexism I encountered in the pursuit of my profession. In fact, he was usually more surprised than I was, and just as deliberate in responding to it. Roland never questioned that his women students should be where we were, never thought that we could not or should not do it--and in his last letter to me, he reiterated those sentiments, and affirmed that he was glad to have been part of the overturning of the blindness of the formerly all-male scholarly guild. He translated this support into reality in many ways: he worked in depth with all those of us who wrote dissertations for him, and the impact of his methodological clarity is visible in our work. He supported the departmental initiatives to steal away all the sharp women off the doorsteps of the graduate schools of the Northeast. When Claudia Camp came down for an interview at Duke (which, in typical Claudia-style, she turned into an interview of Duke), Roland pushed me out the door with a and guide her to the Dining Hall, saying "Get her for us!" But that was only the beginning: whether with offprints or that complimentary JBC, introductions to publishers, job recommendations, all kinds of inclusions on meeting panels and on boards, or at professional meetings, Roland followed through for his students, well after their degrees had been completed.
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So, as a walking emissary of the Tree of Life (ah, that Q-Tip motif, back when they had wooden sticks), Roland became that to those who grabbed hold of him. Faced with a crowd of feisty women, often with interests outside of his training and purview, he took the extraordinary step of joining us in our studies, rather than discouraging us from working outside the realms where he felt his competence lay. "Images of Women" and "folkloristic" applications of method to Bible were not exactly falling off the tree in the late 70s; there were no set guidelines for how to work on interdisciplinary topics or feminist questions! While we all thanked God repeatedly that Carol Meyers was available to us over in Duke College and on site at excavations, without Roland's willingness to explore brave new worlds with us, I wonder sometimes what sort of scholars we would have become. With Roland, we sensed paradigms for collaborative scholarship; he insisted on being taught before he could feel comfortable directing a dissertation in one of these off-center topics. Together, he and I studied Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Mapping (ably guided in our readings by my husband, at the time a Ph.D. student in Experimental Psychology) so we could both follow the comments of structural linguists on the function of form in the proverb genre. "All these charts!" he said, "do they actually mean anything to you?" Reluctantly, I admitted that they did--sort of--and his response was "Show me!" I was not the only one for whom he was willing to read widely: the Camp dissertation, practically the first world-wide to take the "Images of Women" methodology into the biblical realm, was another place where the professor became the student and the student the professor. I suspect there are good reasons why none of us felt any pressing desire to "slay the father" in our writings, and Roland's simplicity, humility and kindness showed us that there was a professional "way of being" which eschewed the typical excesses of ego. I know only now, after many years of teaching, what it costs when a teacher looks up and smiles when you've knocked on the door, inviting you into his world! Roland did that.
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