The Illinois Tradition Awards

In the Spring of 1984, the faculty of the Department of Speech Communication voted to establish a program of annual awards to students. Conferred for the first time in 1985, these awards recognize distinguished achievement by graduate and undergraduate students, and emphasize the department’s commitment to encourage its students to seek excellence in scholarship, teaching, and service.

In naming these awards, the faculty chose to honor persons who played especially important roles in building and perpetuating the tradition of leadership and excellence in teaching and research inherited by the present generation of students and faculty. Each award is named for a former member of the department’s faculty or staff, and the awards are known collectively as the Illinois Tradition Awards. The annual presentation of these awards recalls with gratitude and affection the contributions of our predecessors and expresses our commitment to building a future worthy of the foundation they laid.

The Illinois Tradition Awards are made possible by contributions from alumni and friends of the department.


The Ruth S. and Charles H. Bowman Award

The Bowman Award is conferred upon the department’s most outstanding graduate student, based on the student’s total record of scholarship, teaching, and service. The award is funded by an endowment established in 1992 by members and friends of the Bowman family. To be eligible for consideration, students must have completed at least two semesters of graduate study in the department and be nominated by a member of the graduate faculty.

RUTH S. BOWMAN, born in Chicago in 1913, graduated from St. Xavier Academy (Chicago), and attended the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois. She joined the staff of the department in 1964 and served as Administrative Secretary until her retirement in 1981. She died in 1984.

At the end of her first year in the department, Ruth Bowman was commended for her efforts by unanimous vote of the department’s Advisory Committee in the only such action ever taken on behalf of a non-academic employee in the history of the department. At that time, then-Head Karl Wallace wrote, “I have about concluded that the department could more readily spare me than it could Mrs. Bowman.” During the subsequent 16 years, succeeding department administrators, faculty members, and graduate students came to share Wallace’s opinion of Mrs. Bowman’s role in the department. In addition to her formidable administrative skills, she is especially remembered for the good humor, good sense, and uncommon grace that she brought to every task, for her concern for the people of “her department,” and for her dedication to the department’s welfare. Upon her retirement, Mrs. Bowman wrote, “Being part of this department has been one of my greatest treasures, something I shall remember with affection and gratitude.”

CHARLES H. BOWMAN, Ruth’s husband, served with distinction on the faculty of the UIUC College of Law for 25 years. Through Ruth, Charley became deeply interested in the welfare of the department and its people. He established the Bowman endowment to honor Ruth after her death, and he corresponded regularly with the department to keep up with us all until he passed away in 1997. When asked if he would like to designate a charity for memorial contributions as his own health was failing, Charley unhesitatingly requested that gifts go to “Ruth’s award.” The award subsequently was renamed in memory of both Ruth and Charles.

The Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award

The Nichols Award recognizes the department’s most outstanding veteran teaching assistant. The award is given on the basis of the total record of a student’s teaching in the department. To be eligible for consideration, students must be pursuing graduate study in the department, have completed at least two semesters of teaching in the department, and be nominated by the person who supervises their teaching or by a member of the department’s faculty.

MARIE HOCHMUTH NICHOLS, born in Dunbar, Pennsylvania in 1908, received A.B. and M.A. degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. She left her first teaching position at Mt. Mercy College to join the Illinois faculty in 1939, where she remained until her retirement in 1976. In 1978 the year of her death, she received an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Drury College.

Mrs. Nichols was President of the Speech Association of America in 1969, editor of The Quarterly Journal of Speech from 1962 to 1965, and recipient of the Speech Communication Association’s Distinguished Service Award in 1976. Her scholarship concentrated on rhetorical theory, as she introduced the field to Kenneth Burke and I. A. Richards, and the criticism of rhetoric. Her critical essays, such as her study of Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, and theoretical inquiries, such as Rhetoric and Criticism, have endured as models of rhetorical study informed by a broad vision of the purposes of humanistic scholarship.

Mrs. Nichols is especially remembered by generations of Illinois students for her qualities as a teacher. Among those qualities, perhaps the most striking was her devotion to her students, from freshmen in beginning courses to doctoral candidates writing their dissertations. For decades, students grew accustomed to seeing the lights in Mrs. Nichols’ office burn late every evening and on weekends, as she worked on the papers that had so readily been put aside during the day to make time for them.


The Henry L. Mueller Award

The Mueller Award recognizes the department’s most outstanding new teaching assistant each year. To be eligible for consideration, students must be pursuing graduate study in the department, be in their first year of college teaching and of teaching in the department, and be nominated by the person who supervises their teaching or by a member of the department’s faculty.

HENRY L. MUELLER, born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri in 1915, received A.B. and B.S. degrees from Southeast Missouri State College, an M.A. from the University of Missouri, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He came to Illinois immediately upon completing his Ph.D. in 1948 and remained on the faculty until his death in 1980.

Mr. Mueller was one of the pioneers in film studies at Illinois, proposing and subsequently teaching for twenty-five years some of the campus’ first courses in film history and aesthetics. He was one of the first editors of the leading national journal in communication education and a winner of the Liberal Arts and Sciences Student Council’s Excellence in Teaching Award. His distinctive view of teaching and its relation to scholarship was explained in one of his last published essays: “We should assay a teacher’s scholarship by the degree to which he has transmitted to his students those legacies of the past which still have significance to us, along with the ability to distinguish between the ephemeral and the eternal in the new ideas which confront them.”


The Bonita M. Whitlock Scholarship

The Bonita M. Whitlock Scholarship was established in 1994 by a gift from Mrs. Whitlock to the University of Illinois Foundation. Mrs. Whitlock, a 1931 graduate of the University, requested that her gift be used to provide an annual scholarship for a student in the Department of Speech Communication.

The Whitlock Scholarship was awarded for the first time in 1995. It recognizes an undergraduate student who has compiled an outstanding academic and service record in the department. Proceeds from the scholarship will be used to defray the recipient’s academic expenses during the 2002-2003 academic year.


The Richard Murphy Award

The Murphy Award honors the author of the most outstanding scholarly paper written during the preceding twelve months by an undergraduate major for a course in the department or for submission to a publication or conference in our discipline. To be eligible for consideration, papers must be nominated by a member of the department’s teaching staff and have been singly authored by an undergraduate major.

RICHARD MURPHY, born in Marienville, Pennsylvania in 1930, received A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and also studied at Cornell University, the State University of Iowa, and the University of Edinburgh. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh (with Wayland Maxfield Parrish), Cornell University, and the University of Colorado before coming to Illinois in 1945. After 26 years on the Illinois faculty, he retired in 1971.

Mr. Murphy was editor of The Quarterly Journal of Speech from 1960 to 1962 and a member of the Administrative Committee of the Speech Association of America. His scholarship in the history of the British and American public address particularly emphasized the role of rhetoric in politics. His intense commitment to safeguarding freedom of speech and civil liberties led to a special interest in the methods of discourse that facilitate deliberation, decision-making, and problem-solving in democratic society. This commitment was also expressed in the many workshops on parliamentary procedure which Mr. Murphy conducted for organizations and groups of all kinds and in his service as parliamentarian of the 1970 Constitutional Convention of the State of Illinois.


The Stafford H. Thomas Award

The Thomas Award recognizes exceptional service to the department by a graduate student rendered over the course of the student’s graduate study. To be eligible for consideration, students must have completed at least two semesters of graduate study in the department and be nominated by a member of the department’s faculty.

Born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1929, STAFFORD H. THOMAS received his baccalaureate degree from the University of Colorado. He taught for eight years at the high school level in South Dakota and Illinois, during which time he earned an M.A. at the University of Wyoming through summer enrollments. He began full-time doctoral study at the University of Washington in 1961, and upon receiving the Ph.D. in 1964, came to the University of Illinois, where he served until his retirement in 1989.

Mr. Thomas was recruited to Urbana-Champaign to work with the Verbal Communication course, which was then housed in the Division of General Studies. With dissolution of the Division, he joined the faculty of the department, and, in the years that followed, contributed in a wide range of roles, including: director of the Verbal Communication course, Associate Head of the department, undergraduate adviser, honors adviser, and director of the teacher training program. As one of the last generalists in an age of specialization, Thomas’ versatility combined with his strong service motivation to become prized assets to the department and its students. Thomas’ scholarship and teaching ranged across all areas of the department, from historical studies of French rhetorical theory to persuasion and the arts. Because of his breadth and talent, he was turned to again and again to take on tasks that were essential to the department’s programs. He always was willing to extend himself and develop new skills in order to do what was needed, particularly when the jobs involved service to students.


The Wayland Maxfield Parrish Award

The Parrish Award honors the graduating senior who, at the end of the fall semester of the year in which the award is given, has the highest overall grade-point average among senior majors in the department’s Sciences and Letters curriculum.

WAYLAND MAXFIELD PARRISH, born in Mohawk Village, Ohio in 1887, received an A.B. from Ohio Wesleyan University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University. After serving as Chair of the Division of Public Speaking at the University of Pittsburgh (where he directed Marie Hochmuth’s [Nichols] master’s thesis), he came to Illinois in 1936 to chair the Division of Speech within the Department of English. Under his direction, the division grew to the point where, in 1946, it was made an autonomous Department of Speech. He continued to serve on the faculty of the new department until his retirement in 1955. He died in 1970.

Mr. Parrish was an early leader in the development of teaching and research in speech communication and a President of the Eastern Speech Association. His scholarship concentrated on the history of rhetoric and the ideas of Richard Whately, although, like most persons in the field’s early days, Mr. Parrish was essentially a generalist. In addition to his wide-ranging scholarly publications, he wrote three early texts that were influential in shaping instruction in three different areas: public speaking, communication education, and the oral interpretation of literature.

When Mr. Parrish was hired at Illinois, his former teacher at Cornell, Lane Cooper, predicted the “the study of rhetoric and the students will fare well in his hands.” Cooper’s prediction was fully redeemed by the growth and development of the Division of Speech under Wayland Maxfield Parrish, its last Chairman. With the hiring of Nichols, Murphy, Dieter and others, he assembled the core of the faculty that would rise to preeminence in its field under the leadership of Karl Wallace.


The King Broadrick-Allen Award

The Broadrick-Allen Award honors the graduating senior who, at the end of the fall semester in which the award is given, has the highest overall grade-point average among the department’s senior majors who are designated as pre-law students.

KING BROADRICK-ALLEN, born in Granite City, Oklahoma in 1918, earned a B.A. from Arizona State University, a J.D. from the University of Virginia, an A.M. from the University of Illinois, and an LL.M. from Columbia University. Broadrick-Allen was Director of Debate at the University of Virginia before joining the Illinois faculty in 1948. He served the University in a variety of capacities over the next thirty-three years. In addition to his appointment in Speech Communication, Broadrick-Allen held a succession of administrative positions concerned with undergraduate education and, especially, the University’s honors program. He was pre-law adviser and Assistant Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences for nearly a decade. In that capacity, he prepared the first version of the LAS Student Handbook and proposed creation of the General Curriculum for freshmen and sophomores in Liberal Arts and Sciences. Later, as Director of University Honors Programs, he was a strong advocate for expanding opportunities for honors students. His personal interest in honors students was evident to his colleagues in speech communication whom he frequently pressed into service to help prepare outstanding students for interviews in national competitions for prestigious graduate and professional school fellowships. He also served as parliamentarian for a variety of campus units. He died in 1981.

Mr. Broadrick-Allen’s scholarship concerned the communication -related aspects of legal advocacy. He was one of the first scholars to work in the now well-established study of communication and the law.