Freedom to disagree continues to go missing within the American social work classroom. Tellingly, freedom as a concept is also missing from two foundational documents in contemporary U.S. social work education and practice: the Council on Social Work Education’s (CSWE) 2022 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) and the National Association of Social Workers’ (NASW) 2021 Code of Ethics:1 as of this writing, a brief search for the word “freedom” in both documents reveals zero results.
Today, within the world of U.S. social work education, one of the primary exceptions to freedom’s absence appears in the CSWE’s call for academic freedom, first raised by the organization in 2023 in response to a push by state legislators to ban “divisive” concepts in higher education, such as critical theory and intersectionality.2 At the time, the organization defended its commitment to “protect academic freedom” and the “core values” that leadership believed define the social work field, which included anti-racism, anti-oppression, diversity, equity, and inclusion (ADEI). By 2025, the CSWE expanded its charge, convening a national forum in June to discuss what it saw as “evolving threats to academic freedom” and emphasizing the topic in an upcoming “special issue” about anti-DEI movements in their scholarly journal, The Journal of Social Work Education.3
To an attentive observer, however, the CSWE’s call for freedom comes across as one-sided and self-interested: while criticizing demands from multiple states to prohibit teaching a specific basket of ADEI-infused ideas, the organization mandated this same basket of ideas in the 2022 EPAS a year prior, requiring more than 900 social work programs across the United States to “prioritize and maximize attention to ADEI” in their explicit curricula and declaring that “all elements of the implicit curriculum are expected to demonstrate the program’s commitment to [ADEI]” to maintain program accreditation status.4
This contradictory call for academic freedom represents the next iteration of a “progressive” perspective-silencing intellectual monopoly in the classroom, a concern that social work scholars and outsiders have pointed out for almost two decades.5 Over this period, social work education has become largely a world unto itself, composed of a majority left-leaning faculty who teach about social ills through ideas based in progressive and radical activism. In recent years, social work professors have striven to have the last political word, compelling ideological agreement while disregarding conflicting value sets that social work students and professionals hold in the United States.6
Backed by the CSWE, social work educators—including those in programs identified in a report by Defending Education7—now possess both a job-preserving incentive and a ready fallback justification for this ideologically slanted approach to teaching. The result is a framework that distorts the field’s understanding of truth, perpetuates a long-standing pattern of inducing intellectual shutdown among students, and directly contradicts appeals by ADEI advocates to embrace “diverse ways of knowing.” Conspicuously absent from this framework are the very “ways of knowing” that reflect the broad spectrum of sociopolitical viewpoints students are likely to encounter both in the classroom and in public life—perspectives usefully mapped in a recent More in Common report8 on America’s “hidden tribes”: progressive activists, traditional liberals, passive liberals, the politically disengaged, moderates, traditional conservatives, and devoted conservatives.
Worse yet, by elevating ADEI-infused ideals above all others across the 2022 EPAS’ nine competencies and five standards, CSWE leadership has effectively alienated social work education from the full spectrum of beliefs about opportunity and personal agency in the American public. Professors have been given the green light to exclude or remain silent about the 70 percent of Americans surveyed from 2018 to 2025 who self-identify as a racial or ethnic “minority”—Hispanic, Black, and Asian—and believe that hard work and effort played a larger role in getting them where they are today, rather than luck and circumstance.9 Nor are they required to seriously consider the majority of Americans surveyed across gender, income, citizenship, and generational categories that believe self-determination matters more than changes to systems and policies.
Social work education sits at a crossroads. One road would continue to educate students with an exclusionary set of pre-filtered progressive viewpoints and deny them their individual human perspective, complex human nature, agency, and mental capacities, reducing them to nothing more than their social identity groups. The other road would support intellectual freedom, seek to honestly grapple with the complexity of personal values and perspectives in the American populace, and recognize the dignity and worth of a person––including the dignity and worth of individual viewpoint diversity underneath a person’s group identities. Thus, the time has come to break up the progressive ADEI intellectual monopoly and restore the freedom to meaningfully disagree in the classroom.
The Intellectual Monopoly
In social work education, the CSWE’s 2022 EPAS has cemented an intellectual monopoly that dictates content in the classroom, one that signifies a complete concentration of curricular power with national backing from the organization’s unchecked “recognizing” body: the Council on Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). In March 2025, a Special Issue10 in The Journal of Teaching in Social Work equated the monopoly to a set of “ideological mandates,” offering evidence of the curriculum’s promotion of compelled value agreement divorced from real-life practice skills. As the Issue explores, social work faculty are now required to implement these directives through the CSWE’s approved definitions of anti-oppression, anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion (ADEI), each steeped in a monochromatic progressive and radical worldview.
For students, the monopoly results in a python-like constriction on their minds, constraining their opportunity to think critically and adequately prepare themselves for the complexities of professional practice. To demonstrate this, I offer philosophical critiques of each definition, informed by methods from Everything’s an Argument.11 Definitions are printed below from the 2022 EPAS Interpretation Guide,12 followed by relevant critiques:
- Anti-oppression: “Strategies, theories, actions, and practices that actively challenge systems of oppression on an ongoing basis in one’s daily life and in social justice/change work. Anti-oppression work seeks to recognize the oppression that exists in our society and attempts to mitigate its effects and eventually equalize the power imbalance in our communities.”
Critique: This definition assumes that the principal aim of social workers is to permanently struggle and “challenge” oppression, neglecting other types of productive, forward-moving actions, including a professional’s ability to mediate, negotiate, and reconcile. The premise of the definition is also divorced from debates about modern reality, with a one-sided suspicion of any type of hierarchy and a misplaced assumption of an unconstrained, blank slate model of human nature. Finally, the definition’s argument distorts the person-in-environment and ecological models that are staples of social work, selectively viewing oppression at multiple levels of analysis while ignoring the importance of well-being, and the human need for order, risk, responsibility, and liberty.
- Anti-racism: “A process of actively identifying and opposing racism. The goal of anti-racism is to challenge racism and actively change the policies, behaviors, and beliefs that perpetuate racist ideas and actions.”
Critique: This definition assumes that social workers have the moral high ground to modify “policies, behaviors, and beliefs,” ignoring that “anti-racism” itself is built on racist assumptions of black and brown subjugation. The definition also overlooks how the act of “racialization”—assigning individuals to racial categories—and the continued use of these categories to “oppos[e] racism” is itself racist, offset by contemporary calls for anti-racialization and deracialization.13 Finally, the definition’s premise silences perspectives of “in-betweeners” who reject “insider-outsider” dichotomies that lead to groupthink and perspective conformity.
- Diversity: “The presence of differences that may include age, caste, class, color, culture, disability and ability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity and expression, generational status, immigration status, legal status, marital status, political ideology, race, nationality, religion and spirituality, sex, sexual orientation, and tribal sovereign status.”
Critique: This definition equates political values with “political ideology” and omits differences in individual viewpoint and moral frameworks that sit underneath social identities. The definition also foregoes the possibility of individuals with “minority-disadvantage” identities that hold conflicting, nuanced values on sociopolitical issues.
- Equity: “Fair treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement, recognizing that all people do not all start from the same place. Equity is achieved by promoting justice, impartiality, and fairness within the procedures, processes, and distribution of resources by institutions or systems. Actively addressing equity issues requires understanding the root causes of outcome disparities in our society and making adjustments to imbalances.”
Critique: This definition assumes that all institutions and systems have the same goal of economic and resource redistribution, ignoring the “natural and social” contingencies of life that occur from birth and the sheer luck that results from freely making choices. The definition also sidesteps questions of political feasibility and historical unfairness, while ignoring political economist Thomas Sowell’s famous argument14 that there are no ideal solutions to social problems, only trade-offs.
- Inclusion: “The act of creating environments in which individuals and groups are engaged, respected, valued, and supported through the elimination of practices and behaviors that result in marginalization. Inclusion is achieved when all people are welcomed to fully participate.”
Critique: This definition assumes that all instances of marginalization between people, groups, institutions, and societies can be “eliminated,” instead of recognizing that disparities are an “inevitable consequence of liberty”15 in societies that do not suppress individual ambition and potential. The definition also impossibly advocates for “all people” while ignoring the necessity of making distinctions between morally and legally unacceptable behavior.
How We Arrived Here
History suggests that starting in the 1960s, social work educators increasingly stacked the ideological deck towards a politically tilted intellectual monopoly. Founded in 1952, the CSWE was established as the profession’s national accrediting body in higher education, tasked with protecting the profession’s identity and keeping programs up to date, often with progressive ideas about American social welfare, namely by following “demands” from students and faculty and “social forces” that informed public attitudes about poverty and injustice.16 As the organization updated its accreditation standards over the decades, the ideological slant mirrored changes to the field’s Code of Ethics, astutely pointed out by social work scholar Naomi Farber: “Each subsequent revision diminished attention to equality and the worth of all individuals and increased emphasis on the ethical obligation to change the ‘structural’ forces assumed to oppress marginalized people.”17
Following the explosion of “rights talk” in the 1950s and 1960s, social work educators became enamored with the promises of community activism as a response to the problems of poverty and “minority” populations. At the same time, the field borrowed from critical theory’s suspicious, despairing ideas about power and the presumed impotence of individuals in the face of all-encompassing structures, institutions, and discourses.18
The ADEI-tinged progressive monopoly in the 2022 EPAS began its development in 2017, later refined in 2021 from a combination of feedback from just over 500 social work professionals out of a profession of over 700,000 and recommendations of an unrepresentative Work Group in the Taskforce to Advance Anti-Racism. “The consensus of the work group,” the members concluded, “was to incorporate content on anti-racism, CRT [critical race theory], and other relevant critical theories into the EPAS. Racial justice terminology must be included in a newly developed EPAS document.”19 Effectively, this meant that social work students and faculty just entering the field never stood a chance at honest disagreement.
Intellectual Freedom: The Way Forward
Intellectual freedom––the right to think for oneself––offers the best way to break the mandated monopoly of ADEI ideas. I draw on the American Library Association’s definition of intellectual freedom, understood as “the right of every individual to both seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction. It provides for free access to all expressions of ideas through which any and all sides of a question, cause or movement may be explored.” This essential freedom for students and faculty complements genuine academic freedom and intellectual rigor in social work education, giving everyone “the right to think for themselves. It respects individual dignity and self-rule. This freedom allows people to form their own ideas and opinions by questioning the world around them.”20
Moreover, this freedom offers the best path towards restoring students’ and faculty members’ ability to question and think freely, including about ways that the current form of monopolized education is divorced from licensure requirements and what social workers actually do in their day-to-day practices. However, it is not enough for social work educators to reclaim the word “freedom,” add it to the field’s foundational documents, and continue teaching in an ideologically slanted way. Lip service will not suffice.
Instead, instilling a norm of intellectual freedom has to begin in the social work classroom by educators across BSW, MSW, DSW, and Ph.D. classes, supported by their administration and—further up the chain—by the CSWE and its ideologically tilted “recognizing” body, CHEA. This norm ought to be actionable, requiring a reconsideration of how the field thinks about, debates, and implements ideas—including pairing competing ideas together and neutrally presenting the full range of sociopolitical perspectives. Crucially, fostering this norm would support individual cognitive liberty for students and faculty members, understood as the right to control one’s own consciousness and an inviolable right to think for oneself.21
Put together, intellectual freedom and cognitive liberty would break up the hard determinism that posits that any facet of our social identity—race, gender, sexual orientation, age, socioeconomic status, etc.—determines our choices and life plans. These two principles counter the despair-inducing assumption in the current ADEI monopoly that those with “minority” identities are “oppressed” with no meaningful sense of agency. This assumption amounts to what might be called minority determinism, the presumption that possessing a minority identity determines one’s sense of agency and the contents of one’s character, life experience, and belief system.
Both principles would also correct the false promise of “social justice education,” a set of pedagogical methods that robs social work students and future clients of the dignity of telling their story on their own terms, requiring them instead to fit their identity into a narrowly binary “dominator versus dominated” worldview. In the same vein, social work educators and CSWE leadership would do well to remember political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s powerful observation on the relationship between identity and thought: “That I am born a certain way does not mean I have to think in a certain way.”22 Indeed, one’s identity does not dictate one’s thoughts, and intellectual freedom demands that distinction.
Conclusion
Defending intellectual freedom and rigor in the social work classroom is not cost-free; it requires time, institutional resources, and courage. Yet in today’s polarized climate, far more is at stake than professional convenience. The future of the field—its credibility, its ethical standing, and its capacity to treat clients, families, and communities humanely—hangs in the balance. A second path now presents itself, and with it a call to integrity for social work educators. Those genuinely committed to upholding “mutual respect” and to “centering human dignity”23 must be willing to break the intellectual ADEI monopoly and restore the indispensable freedom to disagree.
Author’s Note: A complete reference list for this article is available at https://defendinged.org/investigations/accredited-social-worker-programs-steeped-in-anti-racism-dei-critical-race-theory-privilege-and-anti-oppressive-practices/
Nathan Gallo is a Master’s of Social Work graduate and hospital nursing assistant based in northern Colorado. He has written about intellectual freedom, tolerance, and cognitive liberty in social work education and decision-making tensions for individuals pursuing aid in dying in the United States. Gallo, with Arnoldo Cantú, contributed “Will Trump’s Executive Order on Accreditation Rebalance Social Work?” to our winter 2025 issue.
1 Council on Social Work Education, 2022 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) for Baccalaureate and Master’s Social Work Programs, 2022, https://www.cswe.org/getmedia/bb5d8afe-7680-42dc-a332-a6e6103f4998/2022-Educational-Policy-and-Accreditation-Standards-(EPAS).pdf; National Association of Social Workers, 2021, Code of Ethics, 2021, https://www.socialworkers.org/about/ethics/code-of-ethics/code-of-ethics-english.
2 Council on Social Work Education, “CSWE Calls for Academic Freedom in Higher Education,” 2023.
3 Council on Social Work Education, “Join CSWE for a National Conversation on Academic Freedom,” 2025; Council on Social Work Education, “JSWE Calls for Abstracts for Special DEI-Focused Edition,” 2025.
4 Council on Social Work Education, 2022 EPAS Interpretation Guide, 2025.
5 Barry Latzer, “The Scandal of Social Work Education,” National Association of Scholars, September 11, 2007; David Stoesz, Howard J. Karger, “Reinventing Social Work Accreditation,” Research on Social Work Practice (2009): 104–11,https://doi.org/10.1177/1049731507313976; Naomi Farber, “The Dystopian World of Social Work Education.” Academic Questions (2023), National Association of Scholars.
6 Nathan Gallo & Arnoldo Cantú, “Will Trump’s Executive Order on Accreditation Rebalance Social Work?”, Academic Questions (Winter 2025).
7 A U.S. nonprofit dedicated to restoring non-political education. See report here: https://defendinged.org/investigations/accredited-social-worker-programs-steeped-in-anti-racism-dei-critical-race-theory-privilege-and-anti-oppressive-practices/
8 Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Míriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon, Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape. (New York: More in Common, 2018).
9 Daniel Yudkin, Weaving the Dream: How Opportunity and Personal Agency Can Shape a Common Vision for America (New York: More in Common, 2025).
10 Vicki Lens, Naomi Farber, Maryah Fram ,“Beyond Ideological Mandates: Critical Reflections on Anti-Racist and Anti-Oppressive Social Work Education,” Special issue, Journal of Teaching in Social Work 45, no. 2 (2025).
11 A. Lunsford, J. Ruszkiewicz, K. Walters, Everything’s an Argument with Readings, 8th ed., (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2018).
12 Council on Social Work Education, 2022 EPAS Interpretation Guide, 2025, https://www.cswe.org/getmedia/78815b36-1a82-47de-be69-fe3191c08762/2022-EPAS-Interpretation-Guide.pdf
13 Carlos Hoyt, The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race, (Oxford University Press, 2016); Greg Thomas, “Deracialization Now,” Journal of Free Black Thought, November 9, 2022.
14 Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (Rev. ed.), (Basic Books, 2002).
15 Jonathan Sumption, The Challenges of Democracy and the Rule of Law, (Profile Books, 2025), 25.
16 Katherine Kendall, Council on Social Work Education: Its Antecedents and First Twenty Years, (Council on Social Work Education, 2002), 110, 163, 199.
17 Naomi Farber, “The Dystopian World of Social Work Education,” Academic Questions 36, no. 4 (Winter 2023).
18 Jeanne C. Marsh, Mary Bunn, “Social Work’s Contribution to Direct Practice with Individuals, Families, and Groups: An Institutionalist Perspective,” Social Service Review 92, no. 4: 647–92 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1086/701639
19 Colita Nichols Fairfax, et al. “Lessons Learned from the CSWE Task Force to Advance Anti-Racism in the Social Work Education Policy and Accreditation Standards: Praxis in a Racially Volatile Society, ” Advances in Social Work 23, no.2: 270 (2023), https://doi.org/10.18060/24989.
20 American Library Association, “Intellectual Freedom and Censorship Q&A,” 2025, https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/censorship/faq.
21 Richard Glen Boire, “On Cognitive Liberty,” The Journal of Cognitive Liberties 2, no. 1: 7–22 (2000).
22 Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 122.
23 Brittany Lynch, Emily Loveland, Megan Hall-Faul, “Distortion, Distraction, and Disservice: A Critical Response to the Backlash against Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Social Work Education,” Journal of Teaching in Social Work 45, no. 4 (2025): 665–74, https://doi.org/10.1080/08841233.2025.2539074.
Photo by Leandro Hernández on Unsplash