A pair of professors admitted they intentionally provoked shame, guilt, and anger in their white students—then recorded those reactions as data for a study.
When Quinn Hafen from the University of Wyoming and Marie Villescas from Colorado State University (CSU) were putting together their study at CSU to determine if co-teaching with professors of different races would be more effective at warming white students up to accepting an anti-racist agenda, ethics were never the biggest concern.
Since the research amounted to professors jotting down journal entries, the study slipped through without ever facing an internal ethics review.
That all changed when, on the eve of publication, the College Fix ran a brief piece on the concerning behavior the study detailed, and the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research (JSSWR), one of the top journals of the field, pulled it, citing the onset of an additional ethics review.
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Now, in a bid to provide the necessary accountability to restore trust in research, higher education, and the governmental institutions intended to address and prevent the kind of abuse detailed in the study, FAIR for All has filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
In that complaint, FAIR cites the following passages from the study as the worst examples illustrating the hostile environment the professors had created in their classes (Hafen is Author 1 and Villescas is Author 2):
Screenshot from page 2 of the OCR complaint, found here.
This OCR complaint follows similar efforts by FAIR to hold branches of higher education accountable including challenging racially discriminatory practices at the University of the District of Columbia, a racially hostile work environment at Penn State Abington, and standards that mandate compelled speech, by requiring the evaluation of students’ values and beliefs as imposed by the counseling accreditor the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP).
Recent Master of Social Work graduate from CSU, Nathan Gallo, shared the following regarding FAIR’s complaint:
FAIR’s complaint to the ED’s Office of Civil Rights on September 30 should put a flashing ‘Beware’ sign above the social work field for any potential BSW, MSW, or PhD student or their loan-cosigning family member. Each year, students of all backgrounds hand over tens of thousands of dollars to higher education, trusting that professors will guide them towards developing into competent, thoughtful, and humane social work practitioners. FAIR’s complaint makes clear that Ms. Villescas and Dr. Hafen self-satisfyingly exploited this trust as they ruthlessly shamed and demonized certain race and gender groups under the cover of ‘anti-racism,’ a phenomenon that students and I also experienced during our program.
To this day, we comprise part of the fallout of this discrimination, left to slowly sift through the confusion of forced discomfort and compelled agreement, with one student poignantly contending they needed to be ‘deprogrammed’ as they secured their first job. We continue to help one another separate fact from fiction; technique from indoctrination; and realism from political nihilism. Together, we realized that no matter our identity—White, Asian, Black, Brown, female, male, Muslim, agnostic, Christian, atheist, Jewish, etc.—we deserved better than to leave class ashamed and ‘shut down,’ as did the unsuspecting bachelor’s student who tried to speak out but became covertly rebranded as a part of a ‘mini mob’.
I am someone who still believes in the humane promise and power of social work; otherwise, I would have dropped out before the sun set on my first year. But the psychological scarring depicted within FAIR’s complaint—and within social work education as a whole—must stop. If redressing harm matters to those in higher education, educators need to come together with an American public fed up with identity-based mudslinging and jointly reconsider: we don’t allow social workers in the working world to discriminate against their clients and families; why, therefore, do we tolerate discrimination in the classroom?
[RELATED: Unmasking the Campaign Against ‘White Supremacy Culture’ in Science]
Arnold Cantú, a former doctoral student at the same university who was in the same cohort as one of the authors, is quoted as saying that he is greatly appreciative of FAIR being willing to take on the filing of this OCR complaint.
Cantú has written about his demoralizing experiences in graduate school, observing how social work education had strayed into ethical and professional misconduct. He told Minding the Campus:
The disenchanting reality of this is that despite having my own values and beliefs questioned by social work faculty for not explicitly endorsing critical social justice ideology—a form of political discrimination—this piece of ‘research’ helped grant one of the authors a shiny PhD. The rectification of my cherished profession is long overdue, especially when social work is tasked with helping people from all walks of life, irrespective of their backgrounds. We can’t be picky and choosy about which identity groups are prioritized, much less so engage in the dehumanization of other groups. Our profession is guided by the Code of Ethics, and no amount of mental or linguistic gymnastics can justify the value of this ‘research’ and treating people this way, especially undergraduate students. It’s laughably shameful.
The filing of this latest OCR complaint by FAIR draws attention to the continued failures in research, higher education, and federal enforcement to protect students from hostile and abusive conditions. For the students who continue to suffer under the combative pedagogy of Villescas, who remains employed at CSU, this is a visceral reality.
If we are to regain social trust in society, the federal government must enforce the existing law. It’s hard to see how public skepticism in our institutions can improve if higher education is allowed to continue to skirt accountability and maintain openly abusive, racist professors on the payroll.
Follow Suzannah Alexander on X.
Editor’s Note: I encourage every reader interested in learning more about the troubling state of social work education to read the National Association of Scholars report, The Dystopian World of Social Work Education. It offers a more in-depth examination of the ethical and pedagogical issues addressed in this article.
Image: “US Department of Education” by Anne Meadows on Flickr
As a current (accelerated) MSW Social Work student at CSU, having both of these professors, I would like to make the comment that this opinion of “white shaming” is far from the majority. Sadly, I believe this is stemming from white fragility and a sense of denial in learning what we are to know and understand in social work. My experience with these professors (as a white student) was always warm. I understand it may be difficult at times to face the messed-up society and system we are part of, but this article takes a ridiculous approach to not fully understanding what we are taught in our program. I believe that as social workers we are to face our own biases and dominant identities, and that may provoke unwanted feelings (such as shame or guilt), but that is something that needs to happen to thus move forward in this work. Without it, we become bigoted white-centered individuals, unhelpful to the people we are to support. I will say it outright, not once did these professors ever make shamming racial comments or demonize my identity as a white person in my five years of knowing them. I know those who have been with me throughout my social work undergraduate time and into my graduate studies and I am secure in us taking and working through our white fragility. I hope those associated with this article can do so too.
But then you identify as female and there is more sexism than racism in the Social Work “profession.” In fact, both professors appear to be White females.
And from the initial College Fix article:
“[T]he more I reflect on that paper, the more I find it cruel to shame students based on immutable identities they hold, regardless of identity,” one observer said via email. “For the professors, it appeared that Whiteand male students were their target.”[emphasis added]
It was the White MALE students that were being abused and you aren’t male.
It is clear that they are describing stereotypical MALE behavior.
And they didn’t run this through IRBas ethically required ever since the infamous stunts of Stanley Milgram back in the 1960s. What these women did was the equivalent of chemstry professors dumping toxic waste in the local river — that too was allowed in the 1960s but isn’t now!
It’s as unethical as a professor hitting on the pretty freshmen — and that also was acceptable in the 1960s but ain’t anymore!
These professors violated ethics rules in their research, and that alone is enough for them to be fired.
Will their PhDs be revoked?
There are procedures for situations where the degree is based on fraudulent or unethical research. It came up when it was discovered that ML King Jr had plagiarized his dissertation — BU decided that since both King and all the members of his committee were dead, there was no one who could defend the dissertation.
But here both are alive — let them defend what they did…