CAMPUS

Student Sues Social Work School, Claims Bias

A former grad student is suing the Rhode Island College School of Social Work, claiming the school’s institutional bias made it impossible for him to graduate. From the Providence Journal:

As a newly enrolled student in 2004, [William] Felkner, a free-market conservative, says it became clear that he would have to transform himself into a left-wing ideologue before he could get a master’s degree.

Felkner’s professors argue vehemently that he’s gotten his facts wrong — especially in assessing the core values of the curriculum, which are drawn from the code of ethics of the National Association of Social Workers, based in Washington, D.C.

Both the code and the RIC curriculum emphasize the role of social workers in pursuing “social justice” for the “vulnerable and oppressed” members of society.

Is that code of ethics so benign, though? Washington Post columnist George Will exposed the underlying ideology of the ethics code in an October op-ed (which also happened to mention Felkner). To wit:

In 1997, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) adopted a surreptitious political agenda in the form of a new code of ethics, enjoining social workers to advocate for social justice “from local to global levels.” A widely used textbook — “Direct Social Work Practice: Theory and Skill” — declares that promoting “social and economic justice” is especially imperative as a response to “the conservative trends of the past three decades.” Clearly, in the social work profession’s catechism, whatever social and economic justice are, they are the opposite of conservatism.

The story has also been picked up by the Chronicle of Higher Education blog. Reading through the Providence Journal article, it’s clear that the issue is not as black and white as Felkner would like. (His teachers described him as a “fussy and difficult student.”) However, it will be interesting to see how the case pans out, especially if FIRE becomes involved.

(On a side note, a self-described “free-market conservative” entering a school of social work seems like a wacky sit-com premise at best, a Sisyphean punishment at worst, but I guess that’s Felkner’s prerogative.)