I’m encouraged by what you say, but I note that most of the researchers you cite are from one institution, Washington University. That some faculty and some institutions are firmly dedicated to truth and excellence doesn’t mean that others aren’t in the grip of political commitments that stand in the way of those ideals.

Consider, for example, the human diversity requirement at the University of Chicago, generally ranked among the top three social work schools in the country:

“In keeping with the School’s mission and the commitment to train students for practice in a heterogeneous society, curriculum content on human diversity is integrated into nearly every course. In addition, students must take one or more courses from a list of approved first and second year offerings. The requirement in human diversity is intended to provide students with an analytical framework to understand human behavior and political processes in the environment of a diverse society to satisfy the following five goals:

1. To promote respect for ethnic and cultural diversity as an integral part of social work’s commitment to preserve human dignity.
2. To foster knowledge and understanding of individuals, families, and communities in their sociocultural and socioeconomic contexts.
3. To analyze the ethnic and political issues related to the patterns, dynamics, and consequences of discrimination and oppression.
4. To help students develop skills to promote individual and social change toward social and economic justice.
5. To provide students a theoretical framework for integrating an approach toward diversity within their own particular area of expertise (e.g., clinical, community, organization, management, etc.).”

Doctoral training in social work/social welfare is grounded in the scientific method, and most PhD programs in social work have a strong bias towards positivist and post-positivist epistemologies. Our training in research methodologies, advanced multivariate statistics, and social/psychological measurement usually equals and often surpasses the training received by students in other social science disciplines.

The NASW is viewed by most social work academics as an anachronism. The CSWE is also losing credibility in academic social work. These archaic organizations have been largely supplanted by the Society for Social Work Research. Instead of dismissing schools of social work as institutions that generate little in the way of academic excitement (as the NAS does in its report), I encourage your readers to explore the Society for Social Work Research. And if the NAS is dim-witted enough not to recognize the intense intellectual excitement being generated by the work of social work academics such as Drs. Michael Sherraden, Luis Zayas, Bruce Thyer, Peter Hovmand, Wendy Auslander, Gautam Yadama, Enola Proctor,Mark Rank, Ramesh Raghavan, Duncan Lindsey and many, many others, then the NAS clearly has no clue about the current state of social work education.

I’d be interested in reading an NAS report on the ideological biases in business schools. The primacy of the profit motive inherent in the business profession is indisputably a normative bias, yet the NAS conveniently ignores the indoctrination taking place in business schools around the country.

I will not deny that the field of social work is inextricably linked with certain normative concepts such as “social justice” and “oppression”. However, there exists among social work students a wide range of opinions on the meaning of these concepts.