FIRE: Social Work Students Judged by Biased HHS Standard

FIRE: Social Work Students Judged by Biased HHS Standard

WASHINGTON, DC (AgapePress) - The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), an academic freedom and individual rights advocacy group, is calling on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to put an end to "political litmus tests in America's schools of social work."

Currently, the federal Health and Human Services Department requires social workers that are part of its uniformed service to have degrees from social work programs accredited by the Council on Social Work Education. But according to Samantha Harris, FIRE's director of legal and public advocacy, the CSWE has standards that violate students' right to freedom of conscience.

FIRE believes that the council's standards "require evaluating students on the basis of their beliefs" and that certain of those standards tend to allow social work students to gain accreditation only if they espouse liberal beliefs, Harris explains. "So we're asking HHS to reconsider their relationship with CSWE -- that's the accrediting agency -- unless CSWE reconsiders its standards," she says.

According to the Council on Social Work Education, graduates of CSWE accredited programs must "demonstrate the ability to understand the forms and mechanisms of oppression and discrimination and apply strategies of advocacy and social change that advance social and economic justice." FIRE's concern is that liberal bias in the interpretation of standards like this may, at many schools, lead to discrimination against conservative students, censorship of their free expression, or limitation of their intellectual and academic freedom.

Harris believes it is likely that some schools are influenced to have these kinds of standards largely because the CSWE requires them. "For example, she cites an incident at Rhode Island College, a public university in Rhode Island. At the School of Social Work there, the FIRE official notes, "a conservative master's student was required to advocate for so-called 'progressive' social changes if he wanted to continue pursuing his degree in social work."

FIRE is calling on the Department of Health and Human Services to sever its ties with CSWE; however, the group has noted that the problem of liberal bias in academic standards is by no means limited to social work programs. In January of last year, Christian student Scott McConnell was dismissed from the graduate education program at LeMoyne College in New York because he wrote a paper supporting corporal punishment and opposing multicultural education.