Editor’s Note: This article originally attributed the phrase “very committed to anti-racism” directly to the Council on Social Work Education’s (CSWE) response to Do No Harm. At the time of publication, the full response letter was not publicly available, and this article relied on an August 6 report by the Center Square, which quoted a source describing CSWE’s letter. The letter, made available on August 20, does not contain that phrase. This article and subtitle have been updated accordingly.

Higher education continues to face intense criticism for its declining relevance to public life and its diminishing value to the average American. Vanderbilt and Washington University’s (WashU) April report on the humanities concluded that politicization, chiefly from the left, “threaten[s] to distort the enterprise” of disinterested scholarly inquiry, what the committee comes to call the “soul” of the university.  

Social work is conspicuously left out of the committee’s examination, despite being among the leading offenders of ideological bias due to “anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion” (ADEI) mandates from the discipline’s accrediting body, the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE).  

These ADEI mandates, affecting more than 900 U.S. programs, do not appear to be going away. On August 6, the Center Square reported on the CSWE’s rejection of Do No Harm’s (DNH) open letter request to remove these directives from the discipline’s accreditation standards. President and CEO of CSWE Halaevalu Vakalahi, in a letter back to DNH, argued that neither President Trump’s executive order on accreditation nor “any implementing regulations of the Department of Education specifically apply to CSWE.” The letter further maintained that CSWE’s Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards “are apolitical and designed to cultivate intellectual diversity.”

Dismantling White Supremacy in Social Work Education: A Scoping Review of Interventions in Schools of Social Work, published in January 2026 by University of Wyoming (UW) Assistant Professor Quinn Hafen and Colorado State University (CSU) Associate Professors Paula Yuma and Tiffany Jones, pushes the ideological boundary further. The paper catalogs ways social work programs can build on ADEI principles to “dismantle white supremacy,” arguing that those principles have not been adopted widely enough by universities.

This work, to be sure, is publicly subsidized. According to UW and CSU salary data, Hafen, Yuma, and Jones are each paid between $75,000 and $101,000 a year—and, in Yuma’s and Jones’s cases, granted the protections of tenure—to advance “social justice” activism.

Jones, for example, openly discussed the importance of passing activist ideals on to bachelor’s and master’s students during a podcast with CSU’s College of Health and Human Services. As we previously reported on Minding the Campus, Jones has also advanced “anti-racist” work through CSU’s Extension program.

The authors say part of the impetus for their January paper was their belief that “the social work academy functions at the convergence of two contextually specific forms of White domination: social work as White social control and higher education as a colonial structure.”

Rather than advancing careful, politically neutral scholarship that directly applies to the social work profession, the authors move in the opposite direction of the Vanderbilt and WashU report and double down on blaming “whiteness” for all of society’s ills.  

Far-left ideologies such as critical race theory (CRT) and critical whiteness theory (CWT) are cited as reasons why higher education must subvert its long-held ideals of objectivity, intellectual rigor, and merit-based achievement. “CRT and CWT provide tested frameworks for both identifying and dismantling these oppressive structures within higher education,” the authors opine, “and more specifically, schools of social work.” 

Moreover, the paper reflects what we have previously described as social work’s “professional smokescreen”: the profession presents its ideological commitments as matters of professional competence rather than politics. In keeping with the discipline’s ADEI “core ideology,” the authors treat anti-racism not as a contested ideological framework but as something social work educators are professionally obligated to teach. They worry, for example, that faculty are insufficiently prepared to teach anti-racism, “thus perpetuating the profession’s inattention to antiracist practice.”

Of note, the paper’s aims do not seem to align with Wyoming’s intellectual diversity law, HB147, which went into effect July 1, 2025, even though Hafen, the lead author, is currently a professor at UW. Hafen was also the lead author on a separate, now-withdrawn “Whitelash” study. 

The fact that the January paper got off the ground in the first place is telling about the profession, but it is also what we, as ADEI skeptics, have come to expect from the field of social work. Michele Hanna, editor-in-chief of CSWE’s Journal of Social Work Education, and professor at the University of Denver, writes proudly about teaching hyper-politicized concepts like “power, privilege, and oppression, systemic disproportionality and disparities and critical race theory.” In 2021, she led a freely accessible paper that spoke flagrantly about “abolishing Whiteness” and the need to “reeducate the White students.” 

More broadly, ADEI mandates from the discipline’s accrediting body, the CSWE, appear to have opened the floodgates to help justify a mountain of ideologically biased studies. Since June 2022, when the most recent requirements went into effect, hundreds of articles have likely been published that place anti-whiteness at the center of social work education and scholarship. We found one on “epistemic disobedience” by “women of color” that urged “disrupt[ing] the power dynamics inherent in traditional classrooms, blurring the lines between academic and activist spaces.”

The authors of the January 2026 paper ultimately arrive at the same conclusion: the profession must radicalize itself and examine the “insidious relationship” between whiteness and classroom education.