Social Work’s Failing Investment

“Our school is firmly committed to anti-oppressive practice, policy, and research. Therefore, we expect our … students to adhere to these values. That means recognizing our own biases, privileges, and experiences with oppression. […] While we support and recognize your academic freedom, we expect that your work aligns with the values of social justice and anti-oppression. I expressed concern during our meeting that I worry you do not see value or legitimacy in these values.”

That is part of a much longer email one of us received from a social work professor (the program director) in 2023, during a recent stint in a social work doctoral program. It wasn’t because the recipient was a rabble-rouser but because he hadn’t completely endorsed the kinds of ideas that commonly fall under the broad umbrella of “critical social justice” (CSJ), which the professor regarded as integral to the social work profession.

Social work education today may only be encouraging more conformity at the hands of bullies. Looking back, opinion journalist George Will argued in 2007 that social work higher education adhered to an ideologically progressive “code of coercion.” That same year, the scholar Barry Latzer opined that “dogma, tendentiousness, and coerced intellectual conformity were becoming integral to the definition of the [social work] field.” It is evident that little has changed. Social work education today may only be encouraging more conformity at the hands of bullies.

Case in point: We recently weathered social work’s progressive “code” firsthand. Case in point: We recently weathered social work’s progressive “code” firsthand at Colorado State University (CSU) as unsuspecting master’s and Ph.D. social work students, an experience that forced one of us—even with a stack of published research contributions—to drop out entirely.

When we initially compared notes in fall 2023, we believed the faculty’s imposition of “non-negotiable” progressively tilted values and pressure to support “anti-racist” research and practice were limited to our program at CSU. Hence a recent Office for Civil Rights complaint against CSU’s School of Social Work filed by FAIR For All that exposed the program’s ideological intolerance and brought to light race- and gender-based discrimination by two professors against white and male students. But after spending several weeks investigating the national landscape within social work, we discovered that indoctrination goes far beyond one public university’s social work program.

All sources point toward ideological capture starting at the top of the national accreditation hierarchy—an obsession with identity politics above all else. As social work scholar and professor Naomi Farber put it, these slanted ideas “are the antithesis of the traditional mission of social work: to ‘enhance individual worth [and] to encourage each person to the full use of his powers and to active participation in our society.’” Such ideas, she observes, “create fertile ground for enhancing the profession’s worst and diminishing its best impulses.”

Thus far, the public has been shielded from the full picture because of the complex ties between institutions. Our aim here is to make things clearer.

Within the field of social work—the country’s largest mental-health profession—the hierarchy we speak of is best conceived as a three-tiered waterfall of institutional permission structures. As ModelThinkers explains, a “permission structure” is an “emotional and psychological justification that allows someone to change deeply held beliefs and/or behaviors.”

At the top sits the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), a seemingly independent nongovernmental organization with equal authority to the Department of Education to “recognize” accrediting bodies. Approval by CHEA is what allows our profession’s national accrediting body, the Council on Social Work Education, to claim title as “the sole accrediting agency for social work education in the United States and its territories.”

CHEA claims to provide the public “assurance” that accrediting bodies are unbiased, ethical, and accountable for student success by conducting a review every seven years. However, in January 2022, CHEA implemented ideologically slanted Standards for Recognition, requiring that each accreditor explicitly “manifest a commitment to DEI.” The board of directors also approved a formal DEI statement, released in May 2021: “We believe that the rich values of diversity, equity, and inclusion are inextricably linked to quality assurance in higher education” and that DEI practices “contribute to student success and that student success contributes to a better, healthier, and more enlightened, progressive society.”

In 2022, the CSWE revised its standards, mandating that every program implement an anti-racism “perspective.” It is worth noting that, on September 29, 2025, revised Standards for Recognition were approved by CHEA’s board, removing the DEI requirement and nearly eliminating any mention of the words “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion.” Whether this “billion-dollar DEI pivot,” as one critic described it, fosters accountability and depoliticization within accrediting agencies “recognized” by CHEA remains to be seen.

Unsuspecting students sign up for these programs in which we are compelled to believe and adopt DEI ideologies. In the middle of this structure is the previously mentioned Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), social work’s sole accrediting body, which sets curricular and practice standards for 900+ BSW, MSW, and DSW programs across the country. In 2022, the CSWE revised its Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS), mandating that every program implement an ADEI (anti-racism, anti-oppression, diversity, equity, and inclusion) “perspective.” Likewise, although not a formal accrediting body, the Group for the Advancement of Doctoral Education in Social Work (GADE) sets guidelines for the country’s social work Ph.D. programs. In 2023, GADE revised its Program Quality Guidelines to include a “commitment to anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion.” These changes provide a permission structure for schools of social work to adopt particular versions of social justice and DEI ideologies.

At the bottom are the 900+ social work programs at the bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral levels. Unsuspecting former students such as ourselves and others sign up for these programs in which we are compelled to believe and adopt critical social justice and DEI ideologies, which are then carried out into clinical, community, and policy practices with concerning ramifications. CSU, for example, relied on the CSWE’s standards to require DEI concepts in its social work courses, hence our respective recent experiences with money- and time-wasting leftist theory in graduate school.

Two troubling examples come to mind from one of our programs. In an Introduction to Social Work class, a professor showed students a graphic that compared a list of invented characteristics of white supremacy—including, but not limited to, objectivity, worship of the written word, and individualism—to bottles of racial poison. Another professor contended that supporting capitalism, racial colorblindness, and personal accountability within public welfare constituted both a “myth” and a set of “discriminatory attitudes”—without neutrally presenting evidence or counterarguments to the class. These are but a small set of examples of imbalanced, unchecked viewpoints that social work graduates will take with them as they begin their careers working with the American public, for example as therapists, case managers, or program evaluators.

All is not lost, but the work of reform toward intellectual pluralism and practicality in social work education will require all hands on deck. Latzer put it well in his report on social work education nearly two decades ago: “We do not presume to prescribe an ideal curriculum for schools of social work, but we do, as supporters of liberal education, also strongly urge that universities ensure that social work programs pay attention to intellectual foundations.”

We consider CSWE’s accrediting oversight of social work programs to be a primary reason for the profession’s ideological slant. Given changing public stances on all things DEI, as well as CSWE’s nonprofit status as a 501(c)(3), we recommend that the Internal Revenue Service utilize one of its mechanisms of accountability and audit CSWE to encourage reform from within. The IRS has rules in place for nonprofits to maintain their tax-exempt status, which include discouraging excessive lobbying and political campaign activity. Given CSWE’s explicit commitment to DEI, their politically motivated pushback against the “Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education” executive order, and the fact of CHEA’s review of the organization occurring only after 2031, we believe an audit is reasonable.

We propose that the CSWE’s upcoming 2029 standards and curricula reflect more ideologically neutral language. Similarly, given the fact of a heavily progressive social work professoriate emboldened by the current EPAS, we propose that the CSWE’s upcoming 2029 EPAS and curricula reflect more politically and ideologically neutral language, as the 2015 EPAS did. For example, one can compare language found in the 2015 EPAS to that of the 2022 EPAS: A CTRL-F search yields zero mentions of “anti-racist” in the former and 14 in the latter, zero mentions of “white supremacy” in the former and two in the latter, and zero mentions of “equity” in the former and 26 in the latter. Beyond changes to accreditation standards, if internal reform towards political neutrality does not occur, we recommend the IRS push towards revoking CSWE’s nonprofit status.

Otherwise, it is worth considering what kind of ideologically tilted support you or a loved one might receive in the future. Finally, we encourage current social work students and faculty to prompt professors to neutrally consider viewpoints, perspectives, and arguments from the moderate and conservative side of the political spectrum—as many departments of economics, philosophy, and international relations are already doing—without writing them off as “myth” or “morally problematic” views. If professors push back or engage in identity-based shaming, we recommend students and faculty seek counsel within their local institution from administrators or programs that support academic freedom and viewpoint diversity. Externally, social work students and faculty can contact heterodox state- and national-based institutions, including the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Heterodox Social Work (HxSW), the Institute for Liberal Values (ILV), and the Open Therapy Institute (OTI).

Otherwise, based on social work education’s current course, it is worth considering what kind of ideologically tilted—and perhaps intolerant—support you or a loved one might receive in the future from a social worker as social or psychological challenges arise around school, economic stressors, substance use, a child’s well-being, mental health, getting older—or, most especially, at the very end of your life.

Arnold Cantú is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist residing in northern Colorado with experience in school social work, private practice, community mental health, and primary-care behavioral health. Nathan Gallo is a Master of Social Work graduate and hospital nursing assistant based in northern Colorado.