Strict Slaves of Slogans

The Child Welfare Cartel tells a compelling story of depravity. It is amazing that over the years so many weak social work programs and undistinguished researchers have been awarded so much money for child welfare training and research with so little to show for it. Yet rather than an isolated problem in a sometimes troubled field, the Child Welfare Cartel is but one instance of the pervasive corruption, torpor, and incompetence that has fatally undermined the core of social work—its academic, intellectual, and professional institutions.

Stoesz’s brief allusion to the weaknesses of academic social work—a synopsis of Stoesz, Karger, and Carrilio (2010) that details the low productivity of academic social work’s faculty, administrators, and journal boards and editors as well as the intellectual weakness of social work students—has been robustly sustained by others, notably Lacasse, Hodge, and Bean (2011). Among a growing number of estimates of social work’s intellectual, scholarly, and educational deficits, Barner, Holosko, Thyer, and King (2015) document the low scholarly productivity of even top-ranked social work faculties compared with psychology faculties. Kahn (2014) notes the dilution of authorship on social work papers, perhaps suggesting the idleness of social work intellectuals and perhaps a cynical gamesmanship of publication as well.

Even while A Dream Deferred sidesteps the quality of social work’s intellectual life, that is, its books, essays, and other published work, it still leads to a tough conclusion: almost 100 years since Flexner’s report on social work’s ambition to become a modern profession, the promise to develop a credible evidence-based practice has dried up like a raisin in the sun (thank-you, Langston Hughes).

Judged from the progressive perspective to which the field lays claim but more importantly in terms of effective service, social work is neither competent as an advocate for justice, as a source of quality social services, nor as an educator of sophisticated social welfare man power. Without a production function in either service or politics, the field persists largely as a ceremonial affirmation of the nation’s inequality and as a spoils system of employment for a lucky few.

Nonetheless, many critics exaggerate the field’s freedom to develop practice. The cause of social work’s degeneracy may lie in social preferences over which it has little control. Yet the intellectual institutions of social work can claim little excuse as the pitiable victims of social parsimony and hostility. Academic social work including the field’s three principal organizations—National Association of Social Workers (NASW), Council on Social Work Education, and Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR)—has been willingly complicit in the degradation of the field.

Social work’s long-standing resistance to coherent objectivity negates professional standing. The postmodernism influence, noted by Stoesz, is merely a recent expression of the field’s permanent and defining enchantment with the sublime, the gnostic, the emotional, the introjective, and the intuitive—the spectral testimonials that sustain an arbitrary, discretionary, and ethically empty form of practice. Social work has never adopted Flexner’s central criterion of a modern profession—objective coherence, that is, science—but instead embraced psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic metaphysics early in its history (Lubove, 1965). A psychologically grounded practice still dominates the field, and in fact, the greatest portion of social workers is employed in mental health while the field dominates the provision of psychotherapy (NASW, 2006).

Psychological approaches to social problems are predicated on an extreme sense of individualism—the beliefs that individuals create themselves can be induced to change and therefore are responsible for their situations. These beliefs are consistent with the institutionalized American distaste for systemic reforms to redistribute income and wealth either directly as cash benefits or indirectly as services such as education, day care, and employment. Yet there is little credible evidence that talk therapy for any problem has ever been able to cure, prevent, or rehabilitate (Epstein, 2006; Moloney, 2013; Zilbergeld, 1983); that attitude change precedes behavioral change (Chaiklin, 2011); and that an egalitarian and redistributive agenda can find comfort in any form of empowerment practice including community psychology and a leftist clinical program (Smail, 2015). Worse yet, there are scant resources to fulfill social work practice predicated on structural or surrogate support, that is, the provision of adequate care to compensate for the failure of customary social institutions such as the family, the community, the labor market, the school system, and so forth.

At the same time that social work practice inevitably fails both in a therapeutic role and in providing quality surrogate care, the field has suborned the possibility of practice disciplined by science with an undue respect for qualitative research and for a malleable, convenient empiricism to contrive evidence of effective interventions. Heineman’s (1981) hostility to science lost the scholarly debate over what constitutes credible research and practice. Nonetheless, the mind and heart of social work are convinced that the scientific imperative is obsolete or irrelevant for social work and thrum with the apercu of practitioner clairvoyance—the primacy of emotion and feeling supplanting objective coherence. On the rare occasions, when the field appears to embrace rigorous methods—the evaluation by University of Chicago social work faculty of the Illinois Families First experiment in family preservation is perhaps among the best of a sorry lot—it butchers the research (Epstein, 2003). No social work program evaluation has risen to the level of Dobbie and Frier’s (2011) evaluation of the Harlem Children’s Zone. Lamentably, the research enterprise in social work has not even reached the first step of developing credible measurement instruments. The long failure to create a definitive empirical literature of social services (including credible estimates of program outcomes) suggests that the field never will.

Already about 90% female, social work is becoming ever more disproportionately so (NASW, 2006). In fact, the same survey of NASW members was unable to include any male respondents in the youngest category. The lack of gender representativeness in social work may emerge from the likelihood that social services in the United States are gendered (Gordon, 1992). The female role is associated with a highly discretionary and perhaps arbitrary form of practice (e.g., public welfare such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, private charity, and notably the range of counseling interventions), while the male role inspires services based on enumerated rights (e.g., the social insurances). Social work’s femaleness pays tribute to its ever greater professional acceptance of practice defiant of objectivity but subservient to dominant social values that are unsympathetic to the material needs of poorer people.

The field is taken with jargon and cliché—best practice, evidence-based practice, diversity, cultural preservation, the strengths perspective, empowerment, and the other quackeries of a marginal occupation with status envy—that convey little substantive meaning while loaded with symbolic acquiescence to social preferences for parsimony in public provisions for people in need. In particular, the notion of empowerment as both a professional obligation and a form of practice is disingenuous without routine evidence of political engagement and without credible evidence that anyone has been empowered besides the worker (Epstein, 2013).

Indeed, diversity, affirmative action, and cultural preservation themselves embrace the very inequality at the root of enduring social problems in the United States ( Benn Michaels, 2007). The “trouble with diversity” is that it accepts inequality as if it were cultural strength and depreciates serious material deprivations and social isolation. Social work in its fawning regard for subcultural diversity ignores the imperative to preserve and expand the core of the American culture that ensures and protects basic rights. There is no wisdom and much peril for the prospects of decent social policy in the sentimental and anachronistic enthusiasms that turn American culture into an anthropological museum of the human experience. There is, however, a compelling need to develop social policy that eases acculturation of new Americans and facilitates the socialization of each generation. Yet social work with its emphasis on a psychological practice of adaptation has almost no relevance to these goals and little intellectual or academic capacity to contribute to them.

The field’s embrace of the curiosity of diversity has been complicit in its academic and intellectual decline. Group affiliation often supplants productivity as a criterion for appointment, promotion, and tenure. Nevertheless, the experience of oppression is quite different than membership in so-called oppressed groups. A formal affiliation is no test of insight; the conversion of the oppressed experience into an intellectual product—notably, quality publication—remains the telling credential. Yet social work academics often rise in administrative and faculty positions not because of their success as intellectuals and academics but far too often simply because of their race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual preference. To the detriment of social work, the affection for group membership as a credential rewards incompetence and discourages the gifted and qualified to pursue careers in the field.

Even worse, the priority of diversity obscures the degree of inequality in the nation by suggesting that there are always qualified candidates for open positions. Thus, solutions to social problems lie with the administrative will to appoint, hire, recognize, or promote. This fiction obscures the vast pools of need in poor and poorer populations that disproportionately include ethnic minorities and thus reduces political and social pressures for greater investment in education, jobs, income supports, and other supportive services. In addition, social rewards allocated on the basis of group affiliation reinforce group competition and thwart the development of larger constituencies. It is bitter irony that preferences for diversity and affirmative action as solutions to social problems promote the very prejudicial discrimination that the field is so sedulous to decry.

On its part, affirmative action has largely benefited White women (and not necessarily poorer ones) rather than the customary class and caste groups at the bottom of American socioeconomic stratification. Yet identifying the hypocrisies of social work does not resolve them since permission for the field’s behavior stems from the culture’s satisfaction with the field’s duplicity.

Tocqueville’s fear that democracy degenerates into a tyranny of the majority is realized in social work—a mediocracy of cheap prestige whose “strict slaves of slogans” ceremonialize mass preferences in social services (1969, p. 258). Social work practice and the culture each emphasize heroic individualism and thus extreme personal responsibility that militates against social provision. Each prefers the intuitive and sublime to objective coherence and each, confusing providence with virtue, insists that they are the chosen on grounds of exceptional achievements, skills, moral superiority, and perhaps even Darwinian survival.

Unfortunately, social work’s derivative hubris has led to a practice that lacks a production function in social service—the absence of any credible proof of cure, prevention, and rehabilitation on the one hand or the development of appropriate surrogate care on the other. Evidence-based practice and best practice are shams unless they imply effective practice and not simply the empty jargon of a socially privileged field oblivious to the fallacy that privilege is earned. Social work has become and probably always has been an expression of popular social denial substituting moral exhortation for material support.

Reflecting the field’s waywardness and irrelevance as a modern profession, Gambrill (2014) excoriated social work and social work education for avoidable ignorance which can be understood as a euphemism for stupidity. In her words, social work has been:

Remarkably successful in neutralizing paradigms that would require close scrutiny of what is done and to what effect. The illusion of teaching and learning is maintained by a variety of strategies including use of surrogate outcome measures and obscurity. We have not been honest brokers of knowledge and ignorance even though our code of ethics obligates us to be so … I do not think that much will change from inside social work, due to the pressures and special interests … (p. 409)

Others have made similarly deep thrusts at the competence of social work research, education, and the field’s general intellectual climate even while torturing their own data and observations to sustain the promise of the field (e.g., Fischer, 1973; Fraser, 1994; Howard, 2015). For one, Howard (2015) documents an increased number of social work publications since 1984 but acknowledges continuing problems of quality and “those informal attitudes and cultural orientations within social work that militate against involvement in science or that reduce scientific productivity” (n.p.). In fact, he goes far to describe an embedded anti-intellectualism, composed in part of “process preoccupation and curriculum compulsivity,” that explains much about the field’s many weaknesses. A less patronizing view toward social work based on the same material presented by these three authors along with Stoesz, Karger, and Carrilio (2010) and other critical analysts might plausibly conclude that investments in social work education and its intellectual life have been futile. One hundred years of social work has come to a situation of weak students, unproductive faculty, misguided and poorly executed research, and an obliging, craven practice rather than a force for social change—the field’s absurd self-delusion—and a boon to those in need. Why bother? Stoesz’s suggestion to eliminate the Child Welfare Cartel by allowing other fields to compete for child welfare funds will have little effect on the quality of social work education or the performance of social work intellectuals, organizations, faculty, students, or practitioners. Moreover, the reallocation of child welfare moneys to competent trainers and researchers may not even repair the fundamental deficiencies of the base of child welfare evidence whose development is impeded by formidable methodological problems, grossly inadequate funding and a lack of access to basic, reliable information.

The reform of social work’s corruption, if indeed any is possible, begs for the near elimination of the social work franchise for specialized education. Undergraduate social work education is a sham of learning and might profitably be terminated. In the spirit that there are too many social workers and not enough good ones, master’s-level programs should be restricted to large regional centers situated in distinguished public universities. There may be enough productive social work academics to provide faculty for 20 of these programs. The prestigious social work programs in costly private universities—for example, Columbia, Chicago, Case Western, and Washington—are not worth the huge tuitions, and their faculties have not distinguished themselves in the general scholarly community for the quality of research and publications but rather for the quantify of publications that are often an artifact of their program’s prestige. Doctoral preparation in social services should be taken out of schools of social work and made joint efforts with social science departments, preferably in sociology and economics. Then again, there is much to be said for simply closing down the field and running a rummage sale of forlorn professors on university campuses.

The United States has long isolated its poorer citizens from main stream institutions and stigmatized them with inferior care. The embedded weaknesses of social work continue the degradation of the poor: feckless intellectuals treating tortured souls in the social melodrama of character, sin, and resurrection. Yet deprived of a production function in helping, social work simply reflects a society memorable for reconstituted potato chips more than humanity, generosity, and truth.

Social work’s intellectual and academic corruption are poorly explained by the field’s embrace of postmodernism or even more broadly by America’s pervasive policy romanticism (Epstein, 2012). These are more the vehicles of depravity than the causes. The cause is deeply moral—the free choice made by generations of Americans to undermine the principles of decency. Clemenceau captured the mood well: “America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization” (Clemenceau, 1945)