A Revolt Against DEI in Social Work?

Earlier this month, the Journal of Teaching in Social Work unveiled a new issue focused on criticisms of the DEI ideology that has been so dominant in social work, healthcare and medicine. 

The issue, titled “Beyond Ideological Mandates: Critical Reflections on Anti-Racist and Anti-Oppressive Social Work Education,” features over a dozen individual criticisms of DEI and the role of social work associations in imposing this ideology onto the profession. 

As a field related to and frequently overlapping with medicine and healthcare, it’s essential for the health of Americans that social work is free from discriminatory and regressive practices and beliefs; Do No Harm previously reported on the National Association of Social Workers’ myriad commitments to antiracism and social activism, and codification of DEI into its ethics statements. 

One article, titled, “Out of Balance: Moving Beyond Anti-Racist & Anti-Oppressive Education,” specifically takes issue with the Council on Social Work Education, the accrediting body for social work programs.

It’s worth noting that the article was published under a pseudonym.

“Debates over the nature of social work education are not new,” the abstract reads. “What is new, however, comes from the Council on Social Work Education’s (CSWE) injection of critical pedagogy into social work education through ‘anti-racist’ and ‘anti-oppressive’ competencies laid out in the 2022 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS).”

The article argues that the actual practice of social work has been diminished and instead prospective entrants into the field are inundated with ideological programming.

“As a result, social work classrooms have become dedicated to fostering moral directives at the cost of practical skills,” the article continues. “Students’ hard-earned money is now thrown away as they sit through lessons of stereotyped, pessimistic ‘moral education’ rooted in ‘luxury beliefs,’ leaving them unprepared for the complexities of practice and failing thousands of clients across the United States in the process.”

Another article, titled “A Critique of Antiracist Ideology,” delivers a dressing-down of the DEI ideology, arguing that it will lead to deleterious outcomes for mental health.

“In this article, I argue that antiracist political activism modeled after the teachings of critical race theory (CRT) and critical social justice theory (CSJ) more generally, is an unethical form of pedagogy and clinical praxis that will likely damage members of society by producing incompetent mental health professionals,” the abstract states.

“Antiracist propaganda in education fails to address (1) the axiological humanistic priorities that center on the distinct phenomenology of individual lives, and (2) inappropriately focuses on race essentialism and colonial blame rather than on (3) universal egalitarian principles mental health disciplines should prioritize in education, training, and public service,” the article continues.

This issue is a tremendous development, representing a departure from the traditional DEI orthodoxy and an embrace of open criticism of the so-called “woke” ideology. The editorial board of the journal described their impetus for the issue being the response to the October 7th attacks on Israel by Hamas, and how DEI ideology was used to justify hateful ideas.

“The galvanizing spark for the call was the response to events following the October 7 massacre by Hamas,” the editors wrote. “This included a not-incidental number of social work students and faculty signing petitions and joining protests that devalued Jewish lives and valorized violence in the name of antiracist practice that deemed Jewish people as being on the wrong side of the ‘settler-colonialism’ or antiracist line.”

“We saw in this response a coalescing of what we have been observing for some time, that perhaps from impatience and frustration with the stickiness of entrenched social problems, our profession has gradually been letting go of the necessary burdens of the humbling search for professional and scientific knowledge,” they continued. 

“Instead, we too often are settling for the comfort of moralistic and rigid truth-claims that, by their own logic, preempt the discomfort of critique,” they added. “In this way, the response to October 7 has been one moment in a larger trajectory of professional change—but a moment we found especially compelling, in the explicit anti-Semitism it perpetrated on too many of our communities and, in so doing, making overt the broader dangers of mandating a single, particular ideology, including the ways in which this compromises academic freedom and the development of critical thinking in our students and our own practice as scholars and teachers.”

It’s heartening to see such strong criticism of the DEI agenda published in such a prominent platform.

Just a few years ago, DEI across all disciplines went essentially unchallenged.

This is good news, and a positive sign that DEI will become just a passing, harmful memory.