Second of a series
THE Commission on Higher Education’s (CHED) proposed reform of the General Education (GE) curriculum is being sold as modernization. We are told it is about responsiveness, efficiency, employability and global competitiveness. But beneath the language of reform lies something far more dangerous. This proposal is not simply a curricular revision. It is a constitutional crisis.
What is at stake here is not merely the number of units in General Education, nor the placement of courses in communication, labor, data or global trends.
The real issue is whether the State, through CHED, can now decide what universities must teach, how they must teach it, and who is qualified to teach it. Because once that line is crossed, academic freedom ceases to exist in any meaningful sense.
The 1987 Constitution is unequivocal: “Academic freedom shall be enjoyed in all institutions of higher learning.” That guarantee is not decorative rhetoric. It is a structural protection against State intrusion into the intellectual life of universities. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed this principle. From Garcia v. Faculty Admission Committee to Pimentel v. Legal Education Board, jurisprudence has consistently recognized that academic freedom includes the right of institutions to determine who may teach, what may be taught and how it shall be taught.
CHED’s draft PSG (Program Standards and Guidelines) intrudes into all three.
The proposal fixes General Education at 18 units, and then prescribes 15 of those units through centrally mandated courses such as Professional Communication, Global Trends and Emerging Technologies, Data and Ethics, Rizal and Philippine Studies, and Labor Education. Universities are left with a token three-unit space for what is euphemistically called “Institutional GE.” This is not flexibility. This is standardization masquerading as reform.
CHED will insist that it is merely setting minimum standards. But minimum standards do not dictate the intellectual architecture of an entire curriculum. There is a profound difference between establishing a floor and constructing the whole building. What CHED is doing here is not supervision but curriculum design by fiat.
And this matters because curriculum is not an administrative detail. It embodies a university’s intellectual identity. A science-oriented institution may design its GE differently from a liberal arts university. A Catholic institution may foreground theology and ethics. A state university may emphasize citizenship, critical social thought or Philippine history. This diversity is not a defect in higher education. It is precisely what academic freedom protects.
But under the proposed PSG, universities become implementors of a centrally prescribed template. CHED dictates the structure. CHED dictates the courses. CHED dictates the competencies. CHED dictates the outcomes. And then we are told universities remain autonomous. The contradiction is almost insulting.
The intrusion becomes even more severe when one examines pedagogy. The draft PSG does not merely prescribe courses. It imposes an entire outcomes-based education (OBE) framework that institutions must follow, complete with required alignment from General Education Outcomes down to Intended Learning Outcomes, teaching methods and assessments. Institutions are required to generate compliance matrices, continuous quality improvement reports, tracer studies, employer feedback systems and standardized assessment mechanisms.
Pedagogy is part of academic freedom. Universities and faculty members must retain the ability to decide how knowledge is taught, debated and transmitted. OBE is not neutral. It is a philosophy of education. To mandate it universally is to impose a singular educational ideology upon an entire higher education system. Once the State begins prescribing not just content but methodology, the university ceases to be an intellectual institution and becomes a delivery mechanism.
The draft PSG extends this logic into faculty governance. Faculty members are expected to possess standardized credentials and undergo prescribed training in OBE, digital pedagogy, artificial intelligence-enabled instruction and interdisciplinary teaching. These may well be desirable competencies. But the question is not whether these standards are good. The question is who has the right to impose them.
Under the Constitution, universities retain the prerogative to determine faculty qualifications beyond basic legal requirements. Yet the draft PSG steadily transfers this power to the regulator. This is bureaucratic control through incremental standardization justified in the language of quality assurance.
The deeper problem, however, is philosophical. CHED’s proposal reflects a technocratic vision of higher education where knowledge must be measurable, comparable, auditable and aligned with labor market outcomes. General Education is increasingly viewed not as intellectual formation, but as competency production. This explains why the arts and social sciences are being “reframed” into broader skills-oriented categories.
But this is where the constitutional problem becomes most obvious. CHED defenders insist that these disciplines are not being removed, only reorganized. That argument sounds reassuring until one asks a simple question: Who gave CHED the authority to do the reframing in the first place?
Because once the regulator acquires the power to redefine disciplinary boundaries and prescribe the structure through which intellectual traditions must pass, academic freedom becomes conditional upon bureaucratic approval.
We have become so accustomed to audit culture, rankings obsession, accreditation regimes and standardization that we no longer recognize when universities are slowly being transformed into bureaucratically managed credential factories. But universities were never meant to function that way. A university is not merely a training center for labor markets. It is one of the few institutional spaces where society preserves the capacity for critical thought independent of political and economic power. Once that autonomy is surrendered, the university ceases to be a university in any meaningful sense.
CHED may invoke Republic Act 7722 all it wants. But no enabling statute can override the Constitution. Regulatory power has limits. The Supreme Court itself warned in 2021 that State supervision “shall not be construed as stifling academic freedom,” and that even benign forms of regulation cannot derogate from institutional autonomy.
That warning now matters more than ever. Because the issue before us is no longer simply about General Education. It is about whether universities in this country will still have the constitutional freedom to define themselves. And if they lose that freedom, then higher education in the Philippines will no longer be governed by scholars and institutions. It will be governed by technocrats.
To be continued on May XX, 2026
Antonio P. Contreras is a professor at the University of the Philippines Los Baños and vice chairman of the board of state-run PTVNI.
