The following tribute was written by Marilyn Norris, past governor of the Province of the Southeast and director of forensics at Mississippi university for Women. Dr. Cromwell was her debate coach, teacher, and life-long friend.

Former National Pi Kappa Delta President Harvey Cromwell died on December 28, 1977, at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Clinic in Houston, Texas, after a brief illness. Born August 16, 1907, the "farm-boy" from Wanette, Oklahoma, earned his B.S. degree from Oklahoma East Central College, his M.A. from Oklahoma state University, and his Ph.D. from Purdue. As instructor of speech and mathematics in Oklahoma high schools, he launched what was to become a forty-seven year teaching career.

During his early years in the profession he served as chairman of the speech department of McMurry College in Texas, coordinator of Instructional Training for the United States Air Force Technical Command, and professor of speech and debate coach at Purdue, where he coached championship men's varsity debate teams from 1944-1949. In 1949 he joined the Mississippi State College for Women faculty as professor, head of the department of speech, and director of forensics. During his eighteen years in that position, he established the department's first speech clinic, founded the state's first campus radio station, directed and emceed a weekly television program, and coached teams which consistently won top awards in national, regional, and state competition in debate and individual events.

Only six weeks prior to his death, Dr. Cromwell was the proud honoree at dedication ceremonies of the Harvey Cromwell Communications Center at MSCW (later Mississippi University for Women) where there is hardly a facet of life that has not been shaped by his twenty-eight years of service. Dr. Cromwell helped to establish the first graduate program and from 1966-74 served as the first dean of the graduate school. He was chairman of the committee which formulated the first mini course program and served as the first director of continuing education. Even after his retirement in 1975 as dean of the graduate school, he continued in a part-time position as grant specialist for the university.

Dr. Cromwell's contributions to education are not confined to MUW; they are national in scope. He is the author of five books and coauthor of two books on speech communication, parliamentary procedure, and phonetics. Sixty-five of his articles have been published in professional journals, and he is listed in fourteen international and national biographies. Only a few of the positions in which he served the speech field were those of chairman of the National Speech Association Committee of Discussion and Debate, director of the Southern Speech Association Congress of Human Relations, SSCA Executive Council member, president of the Mississippi Speech Association and a member of its Executive Council for fourteen years, and director of Mississippi Youth Congress.

Dr. Cromwell's awards included citations from the President of the United States and the Governor of Mississippi for his work on national and state committees to employ the handicapped. Dearest to his heart, though, were the ideals and principles of Pi Kappa Delta. After serving as editor of The Forensic (1951-54) and as governor of the Province of the Southeast, he became a member of the National Council (1955-67), national vice-president (1957-59), and national president (1959-61). He was national convention chairman for the Fiftieth Anniversary Convention in 1963 and at that convention was among those elected to receive the Distinguished Service Award.

It is as a teacher, however, that "Dr. C" made his most lasting contribution. That teaching by no means ended with his retirement from the MUW classroom. Until the summer before his death, he continued to teach the Men's Sunday School Class at Columbus First Baptist Church, where he had been a teacher for twenty-five years.

Ironically, when his students and colleagues think of Dr. C., it is the "C's" which best characterize him. Concern - His genuine concern for each and every student permeated every minute of his teaching. Regardless of how inundated he might have been with the burdensome details of administering a department, a graduate program, or Pi Kappa Delta Nationals, Dr. C. always had time to sit and listen and talk with each student about his individual problems, goals, and ambitions. Communication - He was a master teacher of that most human of all activities, communication. I doubt that any teacher in the country has taught his students so well "the art of persuasion, beautiful and just." Curiosity - As important as communication skills are, Dr. C. taught his students knowledge of far greater worth. Through example and precept he instilled within each of us an insatiable thirst for knowledge, the kind of intellectual curiosity that is not satisfied with the superficial who? what? when?, but compelled to discover the more important how? and why? not only about one's field of specialization, but about the entire province of human knowledge. Challenge - In teaching us intellectual curiosity, he challenged each of us to be self-actualized people, to become all that we could be, for he endeavored not so much to impart wisdom as to educate us, in the true sense of the word, by leading each of us to the threshold of his own mind. Courage - It takes a special kind of courage to risk the potential for failure inherent in the undertaking of innovative academic programs such as those which Dr. Cromwell initiated.

In his personal life, especially in the year in which his first wife suffered from a brain tumor and in the weeks preceding his own death, Dr. C. displayed that unique courage which, according to Tennessee Williams, elevates only a few "to that high station in life earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace." Concern, communication, intellectual curiosity, challenge, courage - these are the qualities which marked him, and these are the gifts which he shared with his students and colleagues. It is with great sorrow and yet a deep sense of gratitude that all who knew him pay tribute to Dr. Harvey Cromwell, that rarest of beings: a truly great teacher whose contributions so significantly affect our professional and national fraternity, but most of all, the thousands of individual students and colleagues in whose lives he wrought a permanent change because he taught and lived as though "someone's soul is always listening."