THE UST Faculty of Arts and Letters (Artlets) has undergone a significant restructuring, elevating six programs, including in-demand offerings in Behavioral Science, Legal Management, Creative Writing, and Journalism, to department status ahead of the opening of Academic Year 2024-2025.
Under the first Artlets reorganization since 2015, all 13 programs in the country’s premier liberal arts college now have their own departments, allowing for greater autonomy in setting agendas, including in research and innovation.
The six programs that were elevated into departments, effective Aug. 1, are as follows:
- Department of Asian Studies;
- Department of Behavioral Science;
- Department of Communication;
- Department of Creative Writing;
- Department of Journalism; and
- Department of Legal Management.
Named inaugural chairs of the new departments were Regina Pato-Agustin (Asian Studies), Gian Carlo Ledesma (Behavioral Science), Assoc. Prof. Joselito delos Reyes (Creative Writing), Asst. Prof. Felipe Salvosa II (Journalism), and lawyer Teodoro Lorenzo Fernandez (Legal Management).
The Department of Communication will now be headed by Prof. Joyce Arriola, the humanities division chair of the National Research Council of the Philippines and the first director of the UST Research Center for Culture, Arts, and Humanities.
Arriola, a respected communication and film scholar, is returning to her old post and succeeds Asst. Prof. Jose Arsenio Salandanan, who had chaired the now-defunct Department of Communication and Media Studies.
Assoc. Prof. Alain Santos, a former legal management coordinator, is the new chair of the Department of Economics, vice Assoc. Prof. Carlos Manapat.
Taking over the Department of Sociology is Asst. Prof. Antonino Tobias IV, formerly the community development coordinator of the College of Architecture. He takes over from Prof. Clarence Batan, the former director of the UST Research Center for Culture, Education, and Social Issues and one of UST’s top researchers in the social sciences.
The newly minted departments will operate exclusively within the college, joining the Department of Economics and the Department of Sociology as college-level departments in Artlets.
According to the University’s general statutes, chairpersons of college-wide departments focus on the academic aspects of their discipline or area of specialization in an advisory or consultative role.
They coordinate with the dean to supervise courses within their discipline and, when necessary, collaborate with the chairpersons of University-wide departments.
In an interview with the Varsitarian, the Artlets dean, Prof. Melanie Turingan, said the reorganization would place heads of each department on “equal footing.”
“I was thinking, why was there a coordinator? Why was there a department chair? They had the same functions,” she said. “At least in this college, all programs are departments–equal footing for everyone.”
Turingan said the proposed changes to the Artlets structure were forwarded to the Manpower Committee of the Office of the Vice Rector and received approval in July.
The BA Asian Studies, BA Behavioral Science, and BA Legal Management programs were previously part of the now-dissolved Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, which was formed during the last major restructuring in 2015.
The BA Journalism and BA Communication programs were housed under the Department of Communication and Media Studies, while the BA Creative Writing program was part of the Department of Literature.
Petition from journalism faculty
In May, UST journalism faculty wrote to Turingan for the program to become a separate department from communication, citing the need for an independent research agenda and the precedent set by other schools with distinct journalism departments.
“An independent journalism department will give us more leeway to design programs, policies, and activities that will be tailor-fit to the changing needs of the industry thereby giving our students the necessary skills and grounding that they need to excel in the workplace,” the letter signed by UST journalism faculty read.
Artlets will continue to have six University-level departments, namely the Department of Political Science, Department of History, Department of Literature, Department of English, Department of Philosophy, and Department of Modern Languages, which provides general education courses in languages such as Spanish, French, and Mandarin across academic units.
Artlets now boasts 14 departments and 13 undergraduate programs.
Established in 1896 as the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters (Philets), Artlets is the oldest liberal arts college in the country and is the second most populous academic unit in UST.
It was renamed “Faculty of Arts and Letters” in 1964 with the merger of Philets with the liberal arts courses from the College of Liberal Arts, which became the College of Science.
