The Hidden Rot in Social Work Schools: Students Speak Out on Ideological Takeover

Discover how MSW programs prioritize "oppression" narratives over real skills—and why grads are left muzzled and unprepared.

Editorial Note: This essay is the first of three in which I uncover the failings of contemporary social work education. All three essays are dedicated to my brother–and to all who refuse to let their group identity speak for them. Part 2, Part 3

It’s been 15 years since four professors wrote their hard-hitting critique about the poor quality of social work education, titled A Dream Deferred: How Social Work Education Lost Its Way and What Can Be Done. Then, confirming their strongest suspicions, another professor published a withering report in 2023, aptly named “The Dystopian World of Social Work Education.”

Beyond the public’s awareness, cracks in the foundation ostensibly laid to prepare the country’s largest mental health profession only continue to grow.

Last March, The Journal of Teaching in Social Work revealed just how deep these latest fault lines go, releasing a Special Issue about ideological capture throughout national social work education. There, to speak from a student perspective, I published an article about my experience with far-left, “progressive” ideology in a Master’s of Social Work (MSW) program at Colorado State University, titled “Out of Balance: Moving Beyond Anti-Racist & Anti-Oppressive Education.” Dismayingly, I felt compelled to publish the piece under a pseudonym to protect the standing of my degree before graduation in May 2025, but I have since revealed myself publicly as the author, “Jordan the Social Worker”.

I was not alone. Here, with permission, I share two other students’ testimonials about experiences in their respective MSW programs, ending with my own to add color to “Out of Balance”. All identifying information has been removed to preserve students’ confidentiality; however, both students were enrolled in an MSW program between 2022 and 2025.

Both are humbly thanked for their eloquence and courage. Suzannah, I also offer a golden thank you for the space to publish their stories.

MSW Student #1:

The true honesty of social work is that no one, at least anyone I know, woke up as a child to dream of becoming a social worker. This is a job that most likely finds the person and not the other way around. I have so much respect, compassion, and empathy for people and communities that educators in the program would describe as oppressed. It was interesting because with my background and who I am as a person and my life experiences, I would be described as an “oppressed person,” yet I never really saw myself as this. I saw myself as someone fighting to make life better for myself and my children while getting the opportunity to enter the world of social work.

I saw this as an opportunity to help uplift and support those who didn’t yet see in themselves the strength to accept better in their lives. But I felt wrong as I immersed myself in a program that seemed to have a higher understanding of oppression and how each of us should view this in each other. The program almost broke me as someone who was screaming inside to say this is not how people at their lowest view themselves. That is where the program lacks authenticity. I struggled most interacting with other classmates who questioned themselves and either took the word “oppression” to a level that left no opening for other interpretations or the opposite: creating this guilt for being white. Someone commented literally in class, “I hate that I am white.” What good does this do to help social workers stay as open and unbiased as possible?

As someone who can culturally and racially identify in either direction, I appreciate that there continues to be racism within our society. However, I disagree with the school’s intentions that feed into a perspective that says, “This is a poor, underrepresented person.” By their standards, I should be sitting here and blaming someone for everything wrong that has happened, but the school forgets that it’s possible for people to move forward in their lives. We need to move away from this way of thinking and empower the person as an individual as they show up, versus what the program teaches, which is to feel sorry for experiences that professors consider as “oppression.” What good does that do for anyone, for either the social worker or the person and the family that they are supporting?

MSW Student #2:

Social work education seems determined to pursue an uncompromising crusade of social justice with JEDI (justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion) as its north star. Looking back at my MSW experience, there was a fundamental dissonance between what we were taught (i.e. to question and challenge all hierarchical structures at all times) and the setting in which we were taught (a massively hierarchical public university). For example, universities do not assume equality of outcomes. Students are assigned different grades based on the quality of their work as assessed by their professors. Social work’s current paradigm of uncompromising activism in pursuit of equity is fundamentally at odds with the mission of a university. Modern universities, in my view, exist to discover and disseminate knowledge in a society. This mission requires rigor, discipline, and merit-based advancement.

Throughout my two-year MSW program, I felt like students and professors believed that any discrepancy in outcomes between students was the result of systemic oppression as opposed to their hard work or genuine differences in academic abilities. Grades were often inflated. Poorly constructed arguments frequently went uninterrogated. Questioning by professors was interpreted as “aggressive” or “attacking” by students. At the same time, faculty seemed emotionally brittle, reactive, and were often unable to hold boundaries for fear of upsetting the students. Standards seemed lowered for the sake of avoiding accusations of “oppression” or “discrimination.” Throughout all of this, I found myself wondering: if a student can’t handle a grad-school-level course on Public Policy or group therapy skills, then maybe they shouldn’t be a social worker?

In my personal opinion, JEDI is great! However, if the field cares more about these values than the pursuit of truth and knowledge, then I believe it ought to leave the university to create its own institutions of learning. Otherwise, social work programs will continue to set up their students for failure through a bad-faith experience of cognitive dissonance, where they are taught to be radical activists at an institution in which radical activism is not allowed.

I also take issue with the fact that we never seriously interrogated the dominant progressive ideology of social work education in any of my MSW classes. In a university setting, there is nothing wrong with a professor assigning radical texts to read and discuss. I view it as a dereliction of duty, however, to not assign anything by anyone who holds differing views. We should be reading texts by defenders of capitalism if we’re going to be reading and valorizing texts by communists and socialists. We should read Thomas Sowell or John McWhorter if we’re going to read Angela Davis and Ibram X. Kendi. This is not about balance for balance’s sake; this is to make students aware of arguments and perspectives outside their own and sharpen their critical thinking skills.

More pointedly, I say that we don’t necessarily need to be reading any of these authors at all! Social work is a field designed to train people to work in helping professions. Less than half of my experience in the classroom was spent on material that I viewed as in any way useful to my job as a social worker. Rambling discussions about neoliberalism and 60-minute videos on white fragility really gave me nothing.

Critical Theory is one of many important theoretical perspectives to teach. However, to be clear, I wasn’t “triggered” or angered by this material. I just found much of it an unconvincing waste of time that took away from practical training. If schools of social work want to engage in heady conversations about epistemology, political economy, history, and ethics, they should take a leaf out of the school of philosophy and allow for more dispassionate and robust debate. Or, as I would recommend, they could pivot back to the topics that encompass the actual practice of social work.

In summary, the choice could perhaps be framed as this: social work could either conform to the structure and mission of the university by tightening academic standards and loosening its ideological paradigm, or it could leave the traditional university altogether and create a new system that prioritizes implementing JEDI values over the acquisition of truth and knowledge.

Without serious reflection and a shift away from watered-down standards of academic performance, I fear that the field of social work will continue to decline in stature as a profession and academic discipline. Without shifting away from an uncompromising progressive ideology, I fear the field of social work will continue to be like a dog chasing its own tail, endlessly running in circles in pursuit of a utopian JEDI world, something it can never catch.

MSW Student #3 (Author):

I could taste the political tripwires in the classroom.

For three years throughout my MSW program, these tripwires muzzled the possibility of honest conversation about the human condition, electrified by professors’ quips about the urgency of “de-centering Whiteness,” of learning to “decolonize social work”—all as they failed to teach my cohort of 30 students the actual practice and decision-making skills we would need to start our careers. It was as if professors virtually ignored that social work was a profession with legal and ethical responsibilities, not a money-wasting, sociological exercise in politically slanted “activism.”

From the first class in August 2022, I refused to swallow the program’s uncompromising views around racial justice, even as a “biracial” person: Was I supposed to walk into patients’ rooms as their hospital nursing assistant––a job I sought to pay my way throughout school––hold their hands as they are dying, and ask them about their experiences of oppression? Was I really supposed to let call lights from patients and families deemed “White supremacists”—solely by virtue of self-identifying as “White”—run on and on?

(Call lights ring in the hospital for a multitude of reasons, e.g. for assistance with checking a blood sugar, ambulating to the restroom, or alerting staff that one is in pain or can’t breathe.)

By the curriculum’s twisted logic, was I supposed to nudge the nurse and have them turn down the oxygen on sick “White” patients, only to add the difference to patients “of color”? Worst of all, were the nursing team and I supposed to try harder during CPR for patients suffering from cardiac arrest that social workers saw as “oppressed”?

Beyond the impracticalities, imagine my surprise as I later discovered how quick multiple faculty members were to cast stones of shame. After graduation in May 2025, I listened to an interview by a professor explaining their guilt-presuming view on “de-centering Whiteness”: “I think it’s just until you prove something is not racist, we need to assume it is”. Later, I came across a high-pitched report about my former school of social work’s “heterosexist and cissexist departmental climate,” prompting me to recall hearing about the same school’s mistreatment of a former PhD student because of his refusal to buy into the department’s “non-negotiable” values. Demoralized, he ultimately left the program.

Imagine my ultimate saddened surprise on July 9 when a faculty member and PhD student said the quiet part out loud in a now-withdrawn “research” paper about the cruel, shame-inducing aim of anti-racist pedagogy. The paper is now the source of an official complaint with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights and subsequent investigation by The Chronicle of Higher Education–justifiable, in my view, as the teachers directed their racialized ire at unsuspecting bachelor-level students:

In line with Bonilla-Silva’s (2019) theory of racialized emotions, we reflected that student’s emotional responses to learning about racism and white supremacy varied according to their social location within the white supremacist racial hierarchy (p. 19).

As stated by Bonilla-Silva (2019), white people may “derive satisfaction and even pleasure in domination,” therefore they have an affective interest in perpetuating white supremacy (p. 21).

One student stated, “I don’t feel safe in this classroom. The judgment and rejection come from the teachers’ reactions rather than the students. This makes me shut down” (p. 23).

By pushing students to engage in uncomfortable reflexivity, we sought to provide students with the skills to identify their own complicity in the reproduction of whiteness within social work education (p. 27).

We viewed this type of social and emotional learning as a form of resocialization, in which both students and instructors challenged white norms of behavior and racialized power dynamics (p. 29).

It’s really interesting how this very bright, very intuitive person of color had assumed those things about me and my approach. But yet the white dudes in the class were attributing oppression and all kinds of nastiness to me. [Laughs] (p. 29).

To this day, I still mine my conscience for the reasons why 29 people and myself–plus untold numbers of BSW, MSW, and PhD students–chose to continue spending thousands of dollars in student loans, only to walk away with few practical skills, race-based shame, and an ideological muzzle.

Continue to Part 2

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Nathan Gallo, MSW, CNA is a recent Master of Social Work graduate and hospital nursing assistant based in Northern Colorado. He has written about the importance of cognitive liberty, tolerance, and value pluralism in social work education. Gallo also led a case study article on medical aid in dying (MAID) and motor neuron disease, published in the flagship journal for this practice, the Journal of Aid-in-Dying Medicine.

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About

Diogenes in Exile began after I returned to grad school to pursue a master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at the University of Tennessee. What I found instead was a program saturated in Critical Theories ideology—where my Buddhist practice was treated as invalidating and where dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy was met with hostility. After witnessing how this ideology undermined both ethics and the foundations of good clinical practice, I made the difficult decision to walk away.

Since then, I’ve dedicated myself to exposing the ideological capture of psychology, higher education, and related institutions. My investigative writing has appeared in Real Clear Education, Minding the Campus, The College Fix, and has been republished by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. I also speak and consult on policy reform to help rebuild public trust in once-respected professions.

Occasionally, I’m accused of being funny.

When I’m not writing or digging into documents, you’ll find me in the garden, making art, walking my dog,