EXCLUSIVE: Medical watchdog urges social work accreditor to remove DEI requirements

Goldfarb wrote that CSWE promotes standards that “encourage social work education programs to treat students as activists-in-training, at the expense of clinical education, and promote a toxic ideology that is antithetical to core principles of healthcare.”

For instance, Goldfarb said that CSWE’s 2022 Education Policy and Accreditation Standards “include two competencies explicitly promoting DEI.”

“Competency 2 mandates that programs ensure students ‘Advance Human Rights and Social, Racial, Economic, and Environmental Justice,’” Goldfarb wrote, “while Competency 3 is aimed at ensuring future social workers ‘demonstrate anti-racist and anti-oppressive social work practice at the individual, family, group, organizational, community, research, and policy levels.’”

“Social work programs are forced to integrate ‘anti-racism,’ and ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion principles’ across their curricula,” Goldfarb said.

Additionally, CSWE’s Competency 4 “states that social workers should understand ‘anti-racist, and anti-oppressive approaches in conducting research and building knowledge,’” Goldfarb said.

Competency 5 “states that ‘[s]ocial workers actively engage in and advocate for anti-racist and anti-oppressive policy practice to effect change in those settings,’” Goldfarb said.

Meanwhile, Competency 9 “notes that ‘[s]ocial workers apply anti-racist and anti-oppressive perspectives in evaluating outcomes,’” Goldfarb wrote.

Beyond Competencies, CSWE’s Educational Policy 4.3: Administrative and Governance Structure “requires that programs develop ‘an administrative and leadership structure that reflects and affirms respect for anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion,’” Goldfarb said.

Goldfarb reminded CSWE of President Donald Trump’s April 2025 executive order Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education that targeted “DEI mandates in higher education accreditation.”

Goldfarb also said that “federally funded educational institutions are subject to numerous prohibitions, forbidding discrimination based on race, color, ethnicity, and national origin.”

“Mandating that these educational entities pursue discriminatory practices and policies is, in effect, a mandate that they violate federal law,” Goldfarb stated.

Goldfarb also noted revisions the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) made to remove requirements that forced medical schools to push “divisive, ideological” content in their curricula, as well as revisions that removed diversity related requirements.

“These mandates actively harm healthcare education, and their removal is long overdue,” Goldfarb wrote.

“Many other medical and healthcare education accreditors have over the past year taken a similar approach to their standards and removed or suspended DEI-oriented requirements,” Goldfarb stated. “Your organization, however, has not.”

“My letter today asks one question,” Goldfarb said. “Will CSWE commit to removing all requirements related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from its accreditation standards?”

Do No Harm’s letter was also sent to Dr. Nasser H. Paydar, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.