The Social Work Bullies At Missouri State

THIS WOULD be funny if it weren’t so sad. The president of Missouri State University, Michael T. Nietzel, recently publicized a report on the university’s School of Social Work, saying that the report was “as negative a review of an academic program as I have ever seen.”

In the report, according to Anne D. Neal,

the external auditors describe a “toxic environment” in which students are bullied, discriminated against because of their faith, and coerced “into certain belief systems regarding social work practice and the social work profession.”

Don’t be too quick to blame the school, writes Neal. What about the accrediting agency, the Council on Social Work Education?

Policy Section 4.2 requires that CSWE-accredited programs “integrate social and economic justice content grounded in an understanding of distributive justice, human and civil rights, and the global interconnections of oppression.”

Yes, a highly academic approach to the concept and practice of social work.

But let us read between the lines. Who are the students likely to be studying at the MSU School of Social Work? Not white males, obviously. And probably not to many white females, either. Social Work lacks the prestige it enjoyed a couple of generations ago.

No. What you can expect is that most of the students in a modern School of Social Work will be minority females.

And that is who the thugs of the bullying class are coercing.

There’s a temptation for conservatives to take the Leninist line about all this. What do we care about nasty goings on in the nether regions of the liberal bureaucracy? The worse the better.

But it won’t do. Because the thugs of the bullying class are beating up on our fellow Americans. And conservatives just don’t like that.

We want all Americans to be free and independent, even the dupes and the victims of the bullying class, even people who will never vote for a conservative or a Republican in their lives.

A liberal, they say, is someone who wants to be paid to help people. A social worker, apparently, is someone who demands to be paid to bully people.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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