The ComArts Connection

I write this entry to put into record the little pieces of information I know about a fragment of UPLB history. UPLB marks its centennial in 2009. It’s also the year when the AB Communication Arts program – my “reason for being” during my more-than-a-decade stay in UPLB - reaches her mid-thirties. This blog talks about her.

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The Bachelor of Arts in Communication Arts (ABCA or ComArts) – UPLB’s first liberal arts program – turns 35 in UPLB’s centennial year.

Founded in 1974, the program arguably marked a milestone in the life of UPLB widely known for its trailblazing research and world-class academic pursuits in tropical agriculture, forestry, and allied disciplines.

The institution of UPLB’s first liberal arts program, however, was carried out not without the proverbial birth pangs. One professor from the Department of Humanities, in fact, alluding to a song from the Broadway musical Miss Saigon, described ABCA as having been “conceived in hell and born in strife.” Such was how tremendous the challenge to those who wanted to institute a liberal arts program in a campus envisioned by many of its constituents to be a regional (that is, Southeast Asian or even Asia-Pacific) leader in science and technology.

It helped a lot though that the program was the brainchild of UPLB’s foremost proponent of liberal education:  Dr. Edelwina C. Legaspi, now UP Professor Emeritus of the Humanities. Almost thirty five years after the institution of the AB Communication Arts program, Dr. Legaspi’s name remains indelibly attached to it.

After graduating magna cum laude from UP Diliman’s AB English program, Dr. Legaspi was recruited by UP College of Agriculture Dean Leopoldo Uichanco to teach at Los Baños in the early 1950’s. Not long after she joined UPCA to teach English language and literature to agriculture majors, she went on a Fulbright scholarship to pursue her master’s degree in English at the prestigious Radcliffe College (now the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University). After earning her master’s in 1954, she chose to return to Los Baños instead of joining Diliman’s faculty at the College of Liberal Arts where her credentials would have been most appreciated. Soon, she chaired the UPCA Department of English (later renamed Department of Humanities), got married, raised four sons, and in the early 1960’s, went together with her family to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York to pursue a PhD in Rhetoric and Public Address under a Ford Foundation Fellowship.

(In the 1960’s, Cornell University was considered the mecca of rhetorical scholarship in the United States. Dr. Legaspi is perhaps the only PhD holder in rhetoric and public address in the UP System and even in the country today. UP Diliman’s Department of Speech Communication and Theater Arts has acknowledged this by requesting, on several occasions, her service as graduate adviser or supervisor to students who chose to do their graduate research in rhetorical theory and criticism.)

Dr. Legaspi returned to UP at Los Baños after earning her doctorate from Cornell in 1966. She reassumed her position as chair of the Department of Humanities, and in March 1973 – more than three months after UPLB became UP’s first autonomous university – she was appointed by UP President Salvador P. Lopez as founding dean of the College of Sciences and Humanities (renamed College of Arts and Sciences a few years later). Her appointment meant a reaffirmation of the UP President’s commitment to liberal education. An eminent man of letters himself, President Lopez told Dr. Legaspi that his decision was based on the fact that among the potential contenders for deanship, she was the only candidate who, despite having resolutely served UPCA, was not “agriculturalized” and who had remained faithful to her training and education in the liberal arts (personal communication with Dean Legaspi).

As dean of the new college – what would later be one of UP System’s largest colleges in terms of enrollment, she worked for the institution of new curricular programs and offerings including a liberal arts curriculum – the AB Communication Arts curricular program, instituted in 1974.

The ABCA’s or ComArts’s institution marked UPLB’s transformation into a comprehensive autonomous (constituent) university that offers degree programs not only in the natural and social sciences and the professions but also in the cultural sciences or the arts and humanities. It may also be construed as a strategic move to put the expertise of the faculty of the Department of Humanities to better use.

Before the institution of the ABCA program, the department had been known only as a “service unit” offering general education (GE) subjects (in literature, humanities, and the like) and service courses (e.g., ENG 10, intensive English modules for foreign students). While the department had been competently serving this distinct function, the absence of a degree program it could call its own did not maximize the expertise that the humanities faculty had had. Faculty members of the department held degrees in a variety of areas in the arts and letters such as English language, literature, language teaching or pedagogy, art studies, foreign languages, and speech and drama. The constraint of teaching the same set of service courses year in year out could debilitate the faculty members’ potential to advance their knowledge and maintain their expertise in their fields. Proponents of the ComArts program knew this very well and admirably took advantage of the department’s composite of expertise.

It should be noted that the teaching of specialized courses in the humanities has not only benefited students of communication arts. Undoubtedly, it has had a significant impact on the teaching of general education courses in the arts and humanities, which every UPLB student needs to take. A department with an academic program that bears specialized courses does something that a mere service department would find difficult to sustain. It ensures that a regular UPLB student taking GE courses gets to be taught by discipline experts who continue to have the passion to learn and pursue advancement in their areas of specialization while at the same time capable of taking a broader or a generalist perspective. (NB: This I must warn the reader, though, is only the ideal scenario.)

The core of the ComArts program is language and literature from which disciplinal areas such as speech communication/speech arts, theater arts, and (creative) writing have developed and continue to be nourished. Consistent with the academic interest of most of its faculty, the program primarily focuses on the aesthetics of linguistic communication or the language arts which have both expressive and communicative functions (This should explain the term “communication arts” and should clear up notions that it is undefined and that it overlaps with what we generally know as communication programs that offer courses in broadcasting and journalism.). Since language is inextricably connected to other semiotic resources (such as audio-visual forms of expression and communication) and not to be taken separately from its historical, social, political, and cultural contexts, other areas and allied disciplines come into the picture.

Designed with a necessary measure of fluidity and flexibility, the ComArts program allows students to take courses in fields like business management, economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, history, human ecology, development communication, and (community) education – courses that will complement and enrich their understanding of communication arts in any of the program’s three areas of concentration: speech communication, writing, and theater arts.  At best, the program enables them to chart their unique directions in the areas that would best nurture their human potential.

In the publication titled “The Humanities at the University of the Philippines at Los Baños and Their Place under the Agricultural Sun” (College, Laguna, 1984), the UPLB Commission on the Humanities, formed by then UPLB Chancellor Emil Q. Javier and chaired by no less than Dean Edelwina Legaspi, offered the following as reasons for ABCA’s existence:

“The ComArts program ‘aims to develop the human being first; his choice of vocation will depend upon his adaptability to the opportunities open to him. He is not meant to be trained technically but to be developed as a versatile graduate.  He is encouraged and assisted in seeking ‘opportunities to think creatively, clearly, deeply and widely about a variety of human problems; … ways of expressing [himself] clearly, logically, and with grace language.’ He is expected to ‘develop a keen sense of values… [and to continue developing his] potential as [a] human being.’

“[The] AB ComArts curriculum is more general than specialized, more liberal than professional.  In keeping with its nature, it directs its efforts to the development of critical thinking and reflective intelligence, in the acquisition of the ‘why’ than in ‘how to’ skills."

The Commission also acknowledged that the Department of Humanities, which offers the program, subscribes to the sentiments of the Alumni Foundation of the University of Chicago when it said:

“The purpose of general liberal education is not a job, but any job; not a profession, but any profession; not a station in life, but any station in life. Like the marriage vow, ‘in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for better or for worse’ general liberal education recognizes that no one knows what life may bring.  Whatever may happen to you in later life, you will be better if you know how to think, to think clearly, and to think for yourself."

Almost twenty five years after the publication of the Commission’s report and almost a decade since the dawn of the 21st century, the core values and fundamental principles behind the AB Communication Arts program have remained steadfast. I believe it is time, and needless to say, worthwhile, to revisit them and reflect on their relevance in our changing times. Such exercise is necessary whether in reaffirming or transforming a program that undeniably made an indelible mark in UPLB history.

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I do not subscribe to the inclusion of a laundry list of names and personalities in historical or feature writing. But to give the reader an idea or peek into the interesting mixture of personalities that have “graced” and fashioned themselves from the AB Communication Arts program in its 35-year old story as well as the Department of Humanities in its 100-year old existence (Note: It started out as the “English department” in the UP College of Agriculture in 1909.), I am writing some of their names below.

I mention here a few ABCA alumni who have ventured into a variety of fields: Alexander Cortez (theater/ stage director), Juliet Labog-Javellana (print journalism/ Philippine Daily Inquirer news writer), Benito M. Vergara, Jr. (history/ author and professor of Asian Studies at the University of California Davis), April Robillos (communication studies/ study abroad advisor at Purdue University), Rene Somera (anthropology/ former Chairperson of the De La Salle University’s Department of Behavioral Sciences), Rodrigo "Jiggy" Manicad (broadcast journalism and television arts/ news and public affairs reporter), Mario Dumawal (entertainment news/ television reporter), Hosanna Espanto (technical communication/ associate editor of The Philippine Agricultural Scientist), Claudette May Datuin (art studies/ professor of art theory and criticism at UP Diliman’s Department of Art Studies), Maria Luisa Culiat-Sadorra (English language teaching/ former Chairperson of De La Salle University’s Department of English and Applied Linguistics), Sheryl Raros (literary arts/ poet), Layeta Bucoy (dramatic literature/ playwright), Father Ruel Lero, SVD (the religious clergy/ priest and spiritual counselor).  Other alumni have gone into such fields as law, business, public relations and advertising, college teaching, primary and secondary education, community organizing, and even the armed struggle of the Philippine Left!  Interestingly, two ABCA alumni have served as chairpersons of the UPLB Department of Humanities – Noel K. Torreta (2001-2007) and Jerry R. Yapo (2007 to date).

Here are some of the names that have graced the faculty of the Department of Humanities: Edelwina C. Legaspi (rhetorician and UP Professor Emeritus of the Humanities), Paul Blanco Zafaralla (art critic and recipient of the 2007 UP Alumni Association Professional Award for Art Criticism), Pacifico D. Espanto (Iluko poet and the first Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences), Paz Eulalia Saplala (former CAS Associate Dean and former UP Open University Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs), Teresita Guillen (writer-painter and former Dean of UP Mindanao’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences), Josefina A. Agravante (Professor of Speech Communication at UP Diliman's Deparment of Speech Communication and Theater Arts and former Dean of the UP College of Arts and Letters), Pedro "Edru" Abraham (ethnomusicologist/performance artist and Professor of Humanities at the UP College of Arts and Letters), Ces Quesada (stage, television and film actress), Cris Millado (playwright and stage director), Remedios Z. Miciano (former Vice Dean of De La Salle University’s College of Education), Ruperta R. Asuncion (Iluko poet and 2008 UP Alumni Association Distinguished Alumna for Culture and the Arts).