I was trained in criminology and sociology at U.C. Berkeley in the mid-1960s, and started off my career at the University of Chicago in 1966 before becoming a very junior professor at Berkeley in the extraordinary fall semester of 1968. If you are a lefty in his mid-20s who came of age after World War II, as I did, it was a liberating moment to feel, albeit illusory, a part of an emerging majority, no need to lurk in the shadows anymore. My young adult years were vibrant, hopeful, and fully committed, in part because teaching praxis made sense. But being this high made it difficult to envision the letdown.

Eight years later, in 1976, out of work, with little prospect of a job in California, I was offered a position at Sacramento State University in social work. I am very grateful to Jesse McClure, then Dean, and the faculty for putting their necks on the block and taking a chance on me. After all, I had lost my job at Berkeley in the political purges of the New Left, was informally blacklisted as a troublemaker, and, worse, I wasn’t a social worker. During my job interview in Sacramento, one faculty member politely asked if I would be willing to return to school and get my MSW. "I’ve read The Child Savers," another asked me, "and want to know why somebody so critical of Jane Addams would want to teach in social work?" Meanwhile, the head of the Criminal Justice Department confided in the university president that I was a liability, given my hefty FBI file.

So, as you can imagine, it was a surprise to me -- and no doubt to you -- when I got the job. I was assigned to teach social work and what was euphemistically called "corrections," which at that time was a special area in our social work program. Ten years later, I was burned out on radical criminology. It became depressing teaching only critique without a visionary alternative. A fall from utopia is rupturing, and always an unexpected event: by the mid-1980s, rehabilitation was passé, law and order ruled, and there was little space for progressive social workers in the growing prison industry and hard-line policies of the Nixon era. My students soured on my cynicism, and so did I.

I shifted to teaching policy, history, and multiculturalism -- issues where there was still political space for activism. Even though Bill Clinton had helped to demolish the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and campaigned for the death penalty and the "end of welfare as we have known it," there was a glimmer of hope in Maya Angelou’s call at his inauguration to "Lift up your eyes/ Upon this day breaking for you./ Give birth again/ To the dream."1

But if you were teaching social work in 1993, the dream quickly became a nightmare. Under Clinton, as we all know, the welfare rolls were gutted by the millions, workfare was reinvigorated with a vengeance, women on welfare became subjected to morality tests not required of the beneficiaries of middle-class entitlements, and out-of-work men -- whose unemployment insurance had run out -- were in effect told to seek out job training and mental health services in jail.2

Bad turned to worse with the Bush presidency. With born-again, fundamentalist, right-wingers as his welfare advisors -- Marvin Olasky, John DiIulio, John Ashcroft, and James Towey -- the administration has begun to make eligibility even more stringent, increase work requirements, and make it easier to get welfare grants to nonprofit organizations that intermingle human services with religious proselytizing and discriminate against employees on the basis of sexual orientation (Stevenson, 2003: 20). Now, naked power is dressed up in the rhetoric of piety. As Gwendolyn Mink (2001: 9) observes, "charitable choice represent a fusion of the neoliberal urge to privatize and the hard Right’s urge to moralize."

While the Clinton administration changed the federal government’s relationship to welfare, a changing world and new Bush policy initiatives have fundamentally altered the landscape of welfare. An expanding economy in the mid-1990s absorbed many former welfare clients -- as many as 60% by some accounts -- into low-paying jobs, but jobs nevertheless. Also, many states chose to use their growing tax revenues to maintain a pre-1996 level of services.

Now, the combination of recession, the pricey and endless postmodern "war on terrorism," the massive cuts in state budgets, and a new round of regressive tax cuts has generated an unprecedented crisis in the welfare system. Income inequality, note economists Paul Krugman (2002) and Edward Wolff, has now returned to the levels of the 1920s.3 With time limits running out on the 1996 TANF legislation and drug offenders completing sentences handed out in the 1980s, we can anticipate that hundreds of thousands of former welfare recipients and state prisoners will flood the job market and service agencies. Child poverty rates are already higher than they were 20 years ago; the number of working poor families in California reached a new high of two million in 2001; and researchers report that over one-third of former welfare recipients go hungry every month (Kaufman, 2003: 16).

It is difficult, to say the least, to teach politically engaged, visionary social work during these worst of times. But as economic inequalities and the social reverberations of the new imperialism increasingly divide the nation, we will have opportunities to do so and we need to prepare ourselves. What follows are some suggestions for new directions to consider in teaching social work policy and history.

Ever since social work took its first steps from charity work to profession in the 1920s, there has been a preoccupation with grounding our ideas in what historian Regina Kunzel (1999: 43-44) calls "the talismans of professionalization -- objectivity, efficiency, rationality." Too often, in my view, this has led to an obsession with affirming the foundational body of knowledge (eugenics, Freudian psychology, systems theory, etc.) and, as a consequence, marginalizing dissenting views. I understand the inclination to give our students a sense that we are united and secure in our views, that armed with the best technical information and "thoughtful practice" -- to quote a popular textbook -- our students can "make a difference" (Popple and Leighninger, 1996: 580).

But let’s face it, the principles we stand for have taken a severe beating for at least 25 years and, even in the glory days of the War on Poverty, the U.S. welfare system lagged far behind its counterparts in Europe. We have lost ground, even witnessed planks of the New Deal rot away under our feet, and we will be lucky in the near future if we don’t sink even further into the mud. As one social work historian predicted without much conviction, "Perhaps we will think and act anew." He said that in 1984, and he was right to hedge his bets (Trattner, 1984: 338-339).

I suggest that we need to try something different than teaching false optimism or -- its debilitating opposite -- telling our students that they need to do more with less and reconcile themselves to accommodating their clients to lives of inequality and injustice. Instead, wouldn’t it be more honest to share with our students our own disillusionment and uncertainties, the anger we feel at living in a political system that advocates welfare for the bloated war industries and benign neglect of our urban and rural poor? Better to invite our students into the dilemmas we face than to fake it. We need their help in charting new maps for the unknown journey ahead. It is okay to let them know that our "foundational body of knowledge" is on shaky ground. They can handle it if we can. In sum, let’s invite students into our own sense of disorientation.

Sharing our uncertainties, however, does not mean that we abdicate responsibility. Quite the contrary, the pedagogical demands will be more complex, more challenging. Let me suggest five ways in which we can move toward reorientation and pursue intellectual alternatives to misplaced optimism or burned out despair.

1.  Make social work history into an "argument about the past," to use Raphael Samuel’s insight, rather than the linear narrative it has become. The "social work story" is typically framed as a lesson in Progress: the collapse of feudalism, rise of industrialization and the punitive Poor Laws, a leap to the amateurish charity and religious movements of the 19th century, then professionalization followed by the grand victory of the New Deal, culminating in civil rights, feminism, and the War on Poverty. Reaganism, at first regarded as a brief zigzag, interrupted the forward march of rationality. Now, 20 years later, the progressive narrative plays false.

    It is time to draw upon a large body of historical knowledge outside and inside social work -- mostly done by feminist historians -- that complicates how we view our history.4 Instead of a story of progress and disillusionment, we find that contradictions and gains and losses have always characterized welfare policy and social work. We need to let our students know, for example, about how the construction of the social work profession in the 1920s led to a distancing from community-based practice and forced many women to choose between their personal and public lives. About the economic role of welfare as punitive regulator of the unemployed and object lesson to the employed. (It is time to dust off Piven and Cloward’s Regulating the Poor, first published in 1971.) About the significance of welfare in the articulation of culturally coded messages about race and dependency. And about the long history of the non-official worlds of parallel human services in communities of color, from the African American club movement to immigrants’ mutual aid associations.

    Such an approach would give our students a sense of complexities and contradictions, of the variety in policy. Maybe we should shake up that comfortable paradigm and teach our history from west to east, south to north. (For example, contrast approaches to welfare in indigenous communities in the Southwest in the 16th century with the European Poor Laws.) Perhaps, then, our students will understand that the roots of the current crisis are buried deep in the past and that there is no single, comforting welfare history.

2.  Develop an interdisciplinary approach that breaks with the tendency to frame social work as an autonomous profession. We always inform our students that economics, politics, and public health shape welfare policies, but these issues often remain as a backdrop to the real work in the trenches of public service. Isn’t it time to get out of our ghettoized intellectual box and give our students a deeper appreciation of the real structural conditions in which they operate? They will be better prepared if they understand, for example, how the economy works, or doesn’t work, and why structural poverty exists in the land of plenty. If we integrate issues of stratification and power into how we teach diversity and multiculturalism, we can avoid the danger of accommodating to segregation. "Celebrating differences" is a far cry from dismantling inequalities (Platt, 2002: 41-46).

3.  Build a comparative framework into the core of the curriculum rather than as an elective or special topic on "international social work." Last spring I was in Austria for a small conference on welfare policy. I presented a paper on the U.S. welfare system, which made everybody thoroughly depressed, especially people from other countries, who look to the USA as a model of technocratic efficiency. But what struck me was how most participants routinely included comparative materials in their papers. One of the side effects of living in a superpower with global ambitions is a tendency toward a self-centered preoccupation. When our students hear our critique, they want to know if there are other models of welfare policy from which we can learn. They need to know that the United States actually has something to learn from other countries.

4.  Deal honestly and openly with the skeletons in the social work closet. We need to do this, not for reasons of guilt, but to understand how a profession built on good intentions can also do great harm. As we are called upon to produce compliant and efficient social workers, we will be under increasing pressure to compromise our belief in utopian possibilities. We have more than compromised ourselves in the past -- imposing Anglo cultural conformity on immigrants, working in segregated settlement houses, participating in the destruction of the indigenous traditions of American Indians, forcing sterilization and untested birth control regimens on poor women, perpetuating myths about homosexual abnormality and heterosexual normality, and buying into the Moynihan paradigm of the pathological Black matriarchy, to name a few positions taken by social work. How can our students be on guard against reproducing inequality and bigotry within the profession if they don’t know this history?

5.  Incorporate the political history of dissent -- both outside the profession in terms of the struggle for a social democratic welfare state and inside the profession over the values and paradigms that we teach -- into the core curriculum. This means going beyond tokenism -- for example, the treatment of "civil rights and social work" in chapter 15 or bringing in a panel of guests to speak on "gay and lesbian issues" in week 12. Our students need to know that there have always been debates about welfare policy and about the content of the social work curriculum. They need to know the strategies and difficulties of making systemic change, as well as be able to choose from the multiple social work traditions with which they wish to identify. The future they face is not easy, and they will have to make some difficult choices about which past they wish to inherit.

Bringing this kind of perspective into our teaching puts significant demands on educators, plus challenges students to manage dissonance and discomfort. But what is the alternative -- keep our blinders securely in place? Tell our students to remain hopeful while they tell their clients to be realistic? Look back nostalgically on the good old days of the War on Poverty? Not exactly a compelling choice, is it?

 If social work is to reclaim its visionary foundations, we must critically interrogate our past. We need to prepare students who can find their bearings in hard and confusing times, who can analyze structures of power, who can think critically and reflectively, who can understand the progressive and regressive legacies of social work, and who can join us in creating new ways of thinking about social work education. The journey ahead takes us into uncharted territories: it is time for some new maps.

1.     Maya Angelou, On the Pulse of Morning, poem read at Clinton’s inauguration, January 20, 1993 (New York: Random House, 1993).

2.     The following critique of welfare policy in the last decade draws upon Tony Platt (2003).

3.     Wolff is quoted in David Cay Johnston (2002).

4.     See, for example, studies done by Mimi Abramovitz, Sarah Deutsch, Gwendolyn Mink, Christine Stansell, Eileen Boris, Paula Giddings, Carol Smith-Rosenberg, Regina Kunzel, Linda Gordon, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, and Jill Quadagno, to name a few.

Johnston, David Cay

2002    "More Get Rich and Pay Less in Taxes." New York Times (February 7).

Kaufman, Leslie

2003    "Millions Have Left Welfare, But Are They Better Off Now? Yes, No and Maybe." New York Times (October 20): 16.

Krugman, Paul

2002    "For Richer." New York Times Magazine (October 20).

Kunzel, Regina

1999    Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890-1945. New Haven: Yale University Press: 43-44.

Mink, Gwendolyn

2001    "Faith in Government?" Social Justice 28,1: 9.

Platt, Tony

2003    "The State of Welfare: United States 2003." Monthly Review (October.)

2002    "Desegregating Multiculturalism: Problems in the Theory and Pedagogy of Diversity Education." Social Justice 29,4: 41-46.

Popple, Philip and Leslie Leighninger

1996    Social Work, Social Welfare, and American Society. Boston: Allyn and Bacon: 580.

Stevenson, Richard W.

2003    "Rules Eased on Financing Social Work." New York Times (September 23): 20.

Trattner, Walter

1984    From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America. New York: The Free Press: 338-339.

From Social Justice 31:1-2 (2004): 159-164. Social Justice is published quarterly. Copyright © 2004 by Social Justice, ISSN 1043-1578. Social Justice, P.O. Box 40601, San Francisco, CA 94140. SocialJust@aol.com.