From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   What Is Happening at the Columbia School of Social Work?   
   By Pamela Paul, Dec. 7, 2023, NY Times   
   During orientation at the Columbia School of Social Work at Columbia   
   University, the country’s oldest graduate program for aspiring social   
   workers, students are given a glossary with “100+ common terms you may see   
   or hear used in class, during    
   discussions and at your field placements.”   
      
   Among the A’s: “agent and target of oppression” (“members of the   
   dominant social groups privileged by birth or acquisition, who consciously or   
   unconsciously abuse power against the members or targets of oppressed   
   groups”) and “   
   Ashkenormativity” (“a system of oppression that favors white Jewish folx,   
   based on the assumption that all Jewish folx are Ashkenazi, or from Western   
   Europe”).   
      
   The C’s define “capitalism” as “a system of economic oppression based   
   on class, private property, competition and individual profit. See also:   
   carceral system, class, inequality, racism.” “Colonization” is “a   
   system of oppression based on    
   invasion and control that results in institutionalized inequality between the   
   colonizer and the colonized. See also: Eurocentric, genocide, Indigeneity,   
   oppression.”   
      
   These aren’t the definitions you’d find in Webster’s dictionary, and   
   until recently they would not have been much help in getting a master’s in   
   social work at an Ivy League university. They reflect a shift not just at   
   Columbia but in the field of    
   social work, in which the social justice framework that has pervaded much of   
   academia has affected the approach of top schools and the practice of social   
   work itself.   
      
   Will radicalized social workers be providing service not just based on the   
   needs of their clients but also to advance their political beliefs and assess   
   clients based on their race or ethnicity?   
      
   When a student group, Columbia Social Workers 4 Palestine, announced a   
   teach-in about “the significance of the Palestinian counteroffensive on Oct.   
   7 and the centrality of revolutionary violence to anti-imperialism,” Mijal   
   Bitton, a Jewish spiritual    
   leader, asked on X, “Imagine receiving services from a Columbia-educated   
   social worker who believes burning families, killing babies, and gang-raping   
   women is a ‘counteroffensive’ and ‘revolutionary violence [central] to   
   anti-imperialism.’”    
   Administrators barred the event from the school, but organizers held it in the   
   lobby on Wednesday. Ariana Pinsker-Lehrer, a first-year student, set the   
   protesters straight. “You’re studying to be social workers,” she told   
   the group, “do better.”   
      
   Since the time of the pioneering activist and reformer Jane Addams, social   
   work has been guided by a sense of mission. Social workers, who are the most   
   common providers of mental health care, as well as the people who carry out   
   social service programs,    
   help the country’s neediest people. Whether social workers are caseworkers   
   in government agencies or — as is the case with most Columbia graduates, I   
   was told — therapists or counselors in private practice, their clients are   
   often the elderly, the    
   poor, veterans, homeless people, people with substance abuse issues and   
   domestic violence survivors.   
      
   According to the National Association of Social Workers, “The primary   
   mission of the social work profession is to enhance human well-being and help   
   meet basic and complex needs of all people, with a particular focus on those   
   who are vulnerable,    
   oppressed and living in poverty.”   
      
   Other leading schools, like the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and   
   Practice at the University of Chicago and the School of Social Work at the   
   University of Michigan, have embraced social justice goals but without as   
   sharp an ideological    
   expression as Columbia.   
      
   The Columbia School of Social Work updated its mission statement in 2022 to   
   say that its purpose is “to interrogate racism and other systems of   
   oppression standing in the way of social equity and justice and to foster   
   social work education, practice    
   and research that strengthen and expand the opportunities, resources and   
   capabilities of all persons to achieve their full potential and well-being.”   
   What was once its central mission — to enhance the world of social work —   
   now follows an emphatic    
   political statement.   
      
   Melissa Begg, the dean of the Columbia School of Social Work, said that while   
   the school’s mission has always been about social justice and “equitable   
   access,” its mission has evolved because “racism is part of the   
   country.” The school, she    
   explained, is trying to build an awareness of and give students the tools they   
   need to address a diverse range of needs. As she put it, “If you think of   
   slavery as the original sin of the United States, it makes sense to center   
   that reality as part of    
   the school’s mission.”   
      
   In 2017 the Columbia social work school introduced a framework around power,   
   race, oppression and privilege, which the school called PROP. This began as a   
   formal course for all first-year students to create what Begg referred to as   
   “self-awareness.”    
   In subsequent years, the PROP framework was applied to the entire curriculum   
   of the school, and the PROP class became a required course called Foundations   
   of Social Work Practice: Decolonizing Social Work.   
      
   According to the course’s current syllabus, work “will be centered on an   
   anti-Black racism framework” and “will also involve examinations of the   
   intersectionality of issues concerning L.B.G.T.Q.I.A.+ rights, Indigenous   
   people/First Nations people    
   and land rights, Latinx representation, xenophobia, Islamophobia, undocumented   
   immigrants, Japanese internment camps, indigent white communities (Appalachia)   
   and antisemitism with particular attention given to the influence of   
   anti-Black racism on all    
   previously mentioned systems.”   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)