Apparently Social Work may no longer be a legitimate field, at least at USC and in Michigan.

Newspeak infiltrates Universities and Governments in strange and inane new ways...

This past week the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work at the University of Southern California released a memorandum that read, in part, as follows:

“As we enter 2023, we would like to share a change we are making at the Suzanne-Dworak-Peck School of Social Work to ensure our use of inclusive language and practice. Specifically, we have decided to remove the term "field" from our curriculum and practice and replace it with "practicum." This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language. Language can be powerful, and phrases such as "going into the field" or "field work" may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign… our goal is not just to change language but to honor and acknowledge inclusion and reject white supremacy, anti-immigrant and anti-blackness ideologies.”

A few days earlier, the State of Michigan Department of Health and Human Services released a similar memo sent to staff at the Children’s Services Agency, and also the Economic Stability Administration”

“Within state government many terms are used to describe our work.  At the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services our community offices are often referred to as “the field”.  Recently staff and stakeholders have raised concerns about the use of the term ‘field worker’ and its implication for descendants of enslaved Black and Brown individuals.  While the widespread use of this term is not intended to be harmful, we cannot ignore the impact its use has on our employees…. Understanding and establishing shared language is essential to our collective progress.  For this reason, as an agency, we will be discontinuing the use of terms like “field work” and “field workers”…This action is a small step towards creating a culture that values the contributions and voices of all employees”.

Historically, language has evolved organically in step with the evolution of society.  Certain words go out of use, or become more popular, or have their meanings evolve gradually over time.  But the more dramatic ideological imposition of language constraints has historically been a totalitarian practice.  

Nevertheless, it is becoming more common in the west.  I have previously written about how Google and associated groups like the Association for Computing machinery, for example, have issued silly guidelines discouraging the use of terms ranging from ‘black box’ to ‘quantum supremacy’.  

Universities, like Stanford, through their “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative”, or Brandeis, through its “Suggested Language List”, have also jumped on the band wagon, issuing guidelines against the use of language that might, in someone’s universe, prove offensive.  In the right mood, one might invent a fun parlor game trying to figure out in advance, before reading the guidelines, what is wrong with terms like “Rule of Thumb”, or “American”.

There is a qualitative shift however between these guidelines—more like a hypersensitive plea for politically correct behavior than an interdiction—and the inane decision by USC and the State of Michigan to unilaterally disavow the description of an entire area (or, to use a more appropriate term, ‘field’) of professional activity on ideological grounds. 

I was going to say, ‘for ideological reasons’, in the last sentence, but reason is not at work here.  How could presumably educated individuals at USC have argued that replacing “field” by “practicum” makes sense, even in the context of their distorted goals?  

The latter term is used by almost no one, and likely understood by even fewer people.  In addition, ‘Practicum’, defined by one dictionary as ‘a practical section of a course of study’, is not an inappropriate synonym for the far broader, and dare I say, inclusive, term ‘field work’.

Indeed, if inclusivity is the goal, how is replacing a colloquial term with clearly understood wide usage today, dating from 1767, where it referred, among other things to ‘gathering statistics or doing research out-of-doors or on-site’, by an esoteric and effete Latin noun—hence directly connected to the ancient foundations of what critics presumably view as our modern western hegemony—inclusive language?   

But even more important than the linguistic unreasonableness of such a replacement is the logical unreasonableness of the claim that such a replacement is even warranted.

In what universe are the concerns of someone who finds the term ‘field’ offensive reasonable?  Those descendants of slaves or immigrants who have a serious problem with the term field need to seek help, but not via the imposition of verbal censorship.

Essentially all of us are descended from people who worked in the field.  Beyond this, in many places, including where I now live, working in the field is a badge of honor.  Are the sensibilities of those who work in the field today less important than the hypersensitivities of anyone who manufacture a sense of victimization at hearing the word because it reminds them of the trials of racial or economic strictures against ancient ancestors? 

On a positive note, there is some growing pushback against some of these silly attempts at language policing.  The Stanford Elimination of Harmful Language Initative website has been taken down after complaints that it actually runs counter to inclusivity.  And the Acting Provost at USC has felt the need to respond to the School of Social Work memorandum by assuring concerned students and faculty that “The university does not maintain a list of banned or discouraged words”, and that—outside of that particular School apparently—“we will continue to use words — including ‘field’ — that accurately encompass and describe our work and research.”

It is worth noting that the USC Dworak-Peck School Decision was in turn governed by the recommendations of a group that is itself clearly linguistically challenged, and were it’s title invented in a piece of literature, would be dismissed as nonsensical: The Council on Social Work Education Advancing Antiracism in Social Work Education through Educational Accreditation Policies and Standards.  

This very term, accompanying this new form of linguistic oppression, is sadly reminiscent of Newspeak in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. His appendix for that book begins as follows:   

“Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication….It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050.”

Depending on your viewpoint, life is either almost 40 years behind in imitating art, or else has now anticipated it by almost 30. 

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