Voices on the air: Speech education and campus radio in the postcolonial Philippine university

In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, faculty and students of the newly organized Department of Speech and Drama (later Department of Speech Communication and Theatre Arts) at the University of the Philippines (UP) were at the forefront of managing the radio station DZUP, mounting radio productions on campus and shaping the academic curricula for classes in radio speech and writing. These pioneering contributions, though significant, have yet to receive due documentation from communication scholars, researchers, and historians in the country. In this essay, I address this gap by bringing into focus archival documents—photographs, newspaper accounts, official memos, and personal correspondences between academics and administrators—that clarify the academic department’s role in the early systems and operations of DZUP. I argue that these efforts are important because of four main reasons. First, they highlight the often-overlooked relationship between speech education and campus radio in the national university. Second, they emphasize the ways in which the radio booth worked alongside the public speaking platform and the theatre stage as a fundamental space where speech-related pedagogies, performances, and practices played out. Third, they show disciplinary genealogy that links the disciplines of speech communication and mass communication in the University of the Philippines. And finally, they shed light on the pedagogical process involved in teaching, training, and transforming Filipino students into a kind of speaking subjects in the postcolonial Philippines.