The state of social-work education in the United States is a “national academic scandal” rife with lefty ideology and doctrinaire rhetoric, says the National Association of Scholars.
The tradition-minded association, which is based in New Jersey, reviewed social-work programs at 10 public universities, including those at UCLA, the University of Michigan, and Wayne State University, and gave them all failing grades in the areas of open inquiry, partisan disengagement, and intellectual pluralism.
Chief among its beefs was that all 10 are accredited by the Council on Social Work Education, which asks the programs to “integrate social- and economic-justice content grounded in an understanding of distributive justice, human and civil rights, and the global interconnections of oppression.” The association also found that nine of the programs required students to “engage in social and political action” and to advocate for policy and legislative changes that would promote social justice.
“It is totally unacceptable for an academic discipline to load mission statements with question-begging concepts that pre-empt the discussion of unsettled questions, prepare students to become activists for particular causes, or require that students swear loyalty to creedal formulations in order to graduate,” said the group’s president, Stephen H. Balch. “Social-work education does all these things.”
This is not the first time the group has tackled what it calls the “rampant politicization” of social-work and teacher-education curricula. Incorporating notions of social justice into academic programs, the group contends, promotes an inherently liberal viewpoint, thereby penalizing students with traditional religious or moral outlooks, and squelching their First Amendment rights. In a previous round of NAS attacks, the head of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education called Mr. Balch’s assertions “a crock of baloney.”
Meanwhile, the association’s efforts to get the U.S. Education Department to derecognize both councils’ accrediting authority appear to be going nowhere. —Paula Wasley
