The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

Help Wanted
“Bank Rob Crew Sought”–headline, WSB-AM Web site (Atlanta), Dec. 18

Is ‘Social Work’ Mere Ideology?
“A former student at the Rhode Island College School of Social Work is suing the school and several of his professors for discrimination, saying he was persecuted by the school’s ‘liberal political machine’ for being a conservative,” Fox News reports:

William Felkner, 45, says the New England college and six professors wouldn’t approve his final project on welfare reform because he was on the “wrong” side of political issues and countered the school’s “progressive” liberal agenda.

Felkner said his problems with his professors began in his first semester, in the fall of 2004, when he objected in an e-mail to one of his professors that the school was showing and promoting Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” on campus. He said he objected because no opposing point of view was presented.

He said Professor James Ryczek wrote to him on Oct. 15, 2004, saying he was proud of his bias and questioning Felkner’s ability to “fit with the profession.”

“I think the biases and predilections I hold toward how I see the world and how it should be are why I am a social worker. In the words of a colleague, I revel in my biases,” he wrote. . . .

Felkner says he was also discriminated against by Professor Roberta Pearlmutter, who he says refused to allow him to participate in a group project lobbying for a conservative issue because the assignment was to lobby for a liberal issue. He alleges that Perlmutter spent a 50-minute class “assailing” his views and allowed students to openly ridicule his conservative positions, and that she reduced his grade because he was not “progressive.”

This quote from a social-work prof at another college intrigued us:

Kim Strom-Gottfried, professor of social work at U.N.C. Chapel Hill, said that faculty members should not impose their politics on students.

“My bottom line is I think clearly as faculty we have to appraise our students based on required competencies and demonstrations of that, whether critical thinking or whatever, but there shouldn’t be a belief litmus test for joining the profession or for an assignment,” Strom-Gottfried said.

“The questions I have in cases such as his–why would someone choose to affiliate with a profession that’s so at odds with his beliefs and his value-base? That’s always a question for me,” she said.

A curious attitude: She doesn’t approve of the faculty imposing its politics, but she seems to think those politics are inherent to the “profession,” so that social work is “at odds” with the “beliefs” and “value-base” of anyone who is conservative politically.

As we tried to make sense of this, we realized that we really don’t know exactly what “social work” is. We tracked down this definition from the Web site of the International Federation of Social Workers:

The social work profession promotes social change, problem solving in human relationships and the empowerment and liberation of people to enhance well-being. Utilising theories of human behaviour and social systems, social work intervenes at the points where people interact with their environments. Principles of human rights and social justice are fundamental to social work.

This does have an ideological tilt that you wouldn’t find in, say, the study of physics. Yet social work does at least have pretensions of science:

Social work bases its methodology on a systematic body of evidence-based knowledge derived from research and practice evaluation, including local and indigenous knowledge specific to its context.

If you were really interested in applying “evidence-based knowledge” in the furtherance of “social justice,” studying welfare reform would seem an eminently worthy endeavor. But if Felkner’s allegations are true, the members of the faculty at the Rhode Island College School of Social Work have already made up their mind. Whatever element of science there is in social work has given way to prejudice and preconception. If Felkner proves his case, lawmakers in Providence might consider doing the taxpayers a favor and simply shutting the school down.

For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”