#wanggungwu

The wood-paneled silence of the National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute in 2005 offered a particular clarity. It was there, in conversation with Wang Gungwu—ANU Professor Emeritus and NUS University Professor—that the true cost of "Professional Communication" became clear. Wang reminds us that running a university begins with immersing oneself in books. Before becoming the Vice-Chancellor (CEO) of the University of Hong Kong in 1986—leading it for nearly a decade—he was a young man in 1950s Manila attending a creative writing workshop led by the novelist N.V.M. Gonzalez. He spoke of poet Virginia R. Moreno and a generation that thrived because their teachers had been trained by Tom Inglis Moore at the University of the Philippines.

Oxford and Sydney-educated, Moore was no transient academic. As the founding adviser of the UP Writers Club and co-adviser of the Philippine Collegian from 1928 to 1931, he did not come to Manila to teach "Expression" or the utilitarian maneuvers of the modern office. He came to facilitate a period of self-discovery for a nation using a new language to find its soul. Moore famously criticized the "adolescent" sentimentalism of local writing and challenged essayists to move toward literary maturity. He introduced the workshop method used at Iowa, transforming the university into a space for intellectual labor rather than polite recitation. These figures weren’t merely learning to "communicate." They were learning how to be.

The Commission on Higher Education (CHED) now proposes a draft to cut mandatory General Education (GE) from 36 to 18 units. It is an administrative decision to treat communication as a mechanistic skill, collapsing the humanities into a job-skills clinic. The memo rests on the dangerous assumption that tertiary-level literature is unnecessary "content" already covered in high school. By stripping the curriculum, CHED effectively demotes the university from a place of higher learning to a site of technical training, defined by "audience-appropriate messages" and "responsible AI use." These are narrow, perishable competencies that mistake software proficiency for intellectual depth.

I have watched the "professional" become a mask for the procedural. When we replace literature with "Purposive Communication," we lose the student’s agency to question the why behind the what. Communication becomes a series of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)—a dry rattle of empty syntax where the goal is merely to avoid friction rather than to speak truth. Without the ethical nuance provided by the humanities, "professionalism" is reduced to compliance. It prepares students to follow a template, but leaves them defenseless against the subtle violence of institutional language or the actual mechanics of power.

The NUS has redesigned its curriculum to better align with the future of work, but they moved in the opposite direction of the CHED proposal. As of 2026, the maturity of their "Critique and Expression" pillar demonstrates that a top-tier university views literature not as a basic skill to be discarded, but as a critical competency for survival in an automated world. In the NUS model, literature is a framework for analysis. Students use "enduring works of the literary and artistic imagination" to develop interpretations that require a level of maturity simply not found in secondary education.

The evolution at NUS suggests that professional communication was never meant to replace literature but to be fueled by it. Their journey from remedial English in the 1970s to the current framework reflects a shift from basic proficiency to high-level readiness. Engineering students now take modules that combine critique with communication, recognizing that a technical graduate who cannot navigate global narratives is fundamentally incomplete. Literature provides the complex human data—the fuel—that prepares graduates for a diverse workforce. CHED’s move to isolate "expression" from its literary source strips students of the emotional intelligence that "digital literacy" alone cannot provide.

When the UP College of Arts and Letters Faculty Center burned down in 2016, we lost more than a building. We lost the smell of damp blueprints and the shared memory of a generation. When we teach students to write about that fire, we are not just teaching them to "apply tools." We are teaching them to map out their own history and grief. The Reframed GE goals include "Ethical Responsibility" and "National Identity." These cannot be taught through a module on AI disclosure. Disclosure is a rule. Ethical weight is a struggle. It comes from reading the unedited words of Jose Rizal, where the tension between being a nation and being a colony is a lived contradiction, not a multiple-choice question.

We owe it to students who were let down by their earlier schooling to treat them as citizens who can think. If our GE program does not use literature as the basis for that thought, we are not improving education. We are simply making it easier for our graduates to become obsolete. From Moore’s Manila in 1930 to NUS in 2026, the world’s leading educational models have used literature to bridge the gap between simple speech and true critique. Removing it is a regression into the adolescent state Moore warned us about nearly a century ago. In the quiet rooms of 1950s Manila, future National Artist NVM Gonzalez understood something the current memo does not. He knew that for a student like Wang Gungwu to eventually write a memo that matters, they must first understand a world that does not yet exist 🌻

𝑊𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑊𝑎𝑛𝑔 𝐺𝑢𝑛𝑔𝑤𝑢 𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑁𝑈𝑆 𝐸𝑎𝑠𝑡 𝐴𝑠𝑖𝑎𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑡𝑢𝑡𝑒 𝑖𝑛 2005, 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑎 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑜𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑢𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑙𝑒𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑒𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑠𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑢𝑛𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑖𝑠 𝑜𝑓𝑡𝑒𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑜𝑢𝑙 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 ℎ𝑢𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑒𝑠.