Columbia University School of Social Work

THEMES FOR A HISTORY:
THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS OF THE
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK

Alfred J. Kahn[*]



There are two reports available covering about half of the history of what is now the Columbia University School of Social Work (CUSSW). Saul Bernstein (1942) of the faculty was allotted 10 weeks to produce what was called a "resumé" of the history as needed by the Community Service Society's (CSS) new Institute of Welfare Research in connection with its program planning process. A limited duplicated edition was produced. In 1954, as part of a Columbia Bicentennial History series, Elizabeth G. Meier completed a relatively brief history that had been begun by Eduard Lindeman. Each is extremely interesting and useful. Neither is complete for its time - nor does either deal in detail with socio-economic-political context or with context of American social welfare, social work, social work education or the University in which the School developed.

Therefore, when the assignment was proposed, it became clear that although I had been at the School for the second fifty years, the topic merited a major project, perhaps 1-2 years of research. That was not feasible for the School or for me. I agreed to do what could be managed in the context of my current full-time program. This has allowed some primary research but required considerable reliance on secondary sources. Nonetheless, when the time came to write what I had assembled seemed to demand at least a rather long paper or a monograph. The program committee relieved me (and the audience) of that burden. Program logistics call for 30 minutes. Hence, the title and subtitle. I offer a narrative and some judgments. The former is incomplete and the latter a string of hypotheses. The other morning-session historical papers, the discussants, the living experience of this entire audience will add substantially to the story and help control for my personal biases.


The First School


We assemble on this hundredth anniversary for celebration and contemplation; but first, we must deal with the question of what makes this School's centennial the beginning date for social work education in the United States and, therefore, the beginning date for the launching of professional social work. I start with a caveat: Robert Merton, citing Newton, has taught many of us about "the dependence of invention and discovery on the existing cultural base" (Merton, 1957, p. 558). In this instance the ground was prepared after the Civil War. State Boards of Charities and Corrections were increasing in number and being staffed. The Associations for Improvement of the Conditions of the Poor (AICPs), Charity Organization Societies (COSs), Children's Aid Societies, State Children's Home Societies, the sectarian family agencies were adding more paid staffs for agency administration or "friendly visiting", and there were similar developments in related fields. Where could they recruit if on-the-job training was not deemed enough? And in the Progressive Era politics after the 1893 depression, the beginnings of modest federal regulatory action and of state social protection legislation, there was widespread interest in social reform, prevention, and the differentiation of socially-engendered poverty from personally-implicated "pauperism". Reformers and home visitors both needed knowledge.

At the meetings of the American Social Science Association from 1865, and particularly in its 1874 spin-off that was to become the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, there was serious discussion about social problems, social reform, and also, in papers by Anna L. Dawes (1893), and Mary Richmond (1897), of the need to create an institution to prepare people for the work in these programs.

This was the soil in which we began. It was 1898, the year of New York City's consolidation into its present political form. The motor car and moving pictures were only three years old. Columbia in its beginning move from 49th Street and Madison Avenue had held its first classes on the heights in October, 1897. The New York Times, in its third year under Adolph Ochs, who turned it into the paper we know today, carried this item on page 7 on June 21, 1898 (a paragraph you have seen cited frequently in the centennial publicity and exhibit):

"A class in practical philanthropic work was organized by Robert W. deForest, President of the Charity Organization Society yesterday morning. The class will work from June 20 until July 30, and is open for graduate students from universities recommended by their instructors, and those who have had experience in philanthropic work."

Meier provides an early chronology which I list in my Appendix A.

From the 1870s, a number of universities had sponsored lectures and even lecture series about social problems, economics, the history of reform, and philanthropy. (As I shall note shortly, Betty Broadhurst (1971) provides fascinating detail.) There were also periodic lectures and training sessions elsewhere in COSs for their staff members in the 1890s. But nowhere but in New York was there a program for a selected group of enrolled students in what was designed as an ongoing program and which ran continuously as a summer school from 1898 and made the transition to a year-round program in 1904.

The basic sources are in agreement:

Lubove (1965, pp. 140-141) - "Social workers in other cities followed the New York lead" (following the 1898 pioneer course).

Hollis-Taylor, 1951 (p. 9) - "The pioneer [of the "embryonic schools of social work"] the New York School of Philanthropy, was founded in 1898 as a six-week summer school...became a full academic year in 1903-4 and by 1910 a two-year program"

Finally, Graham Taylor, one of the field's great pioneers and leader of the University of Chicago social work education initiatives (a 3-month course) in 1903, who was chairman of the Committee on Training for Social Workers of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, reported for his committee as follows to the 1905 meeting, by which time there were four one-year schools:

"Training schools thus arose not only simultaneously but under remarkably similar conditions. The Charity Organization Society of New York was first in the field with its Summer School in Philanthropic Work which for eight years has succeeded in attracting students by its unique educational methods" (Johnson, 1905, p. 437).[1]

By 1904 the direction had become clear: The New York School of Philanthropy was conducting its one-year course; in Boston, Harvard and Simmons jointly created the Boston School for Social Workers (Harvard withdrew in 1912); there were Extension Division courses at the University of Chicago, and, eventually, in 1908 a one-year full-time school (eventually from 1920 the first social work school in the U.S. to become part of a university); and in St. Louis there was launched the School for Practical Training of Charity Workers. That same year there were schools in London and Liverpool. Amsterdam has a claim to the first year-round school in the world in 1899 (U.N. 1958, pp. 107-115).

After the first week of the year-round program in 1904 a gift of securities with an assured annual income of $10,000 from John S. Kennedy, vice-chairman of the COS, who earlier had financed construction of the United Charities Building, made possible the formal establishment of a permanent institution. At the dinner honoring Kennedy, Daniel C. Gilman, president of the John Hopkins, discussed some of the work of the pioneer scholars who created the field (see below) and he then commented:

"Now New York comes to the front, larger, richer, and more venturesome than any city. The building was here, the leaders, the scholars, the ideas, the organization. Waiting for what? Endowment. So endowment enters...bearing a letter which is a sort of charter...a bill of duties, a summary of principles." (Gilman, 1906 as quoted by Broadhurst, 1971, p. 838).



CURRICULUM

A Dual Heritage


Not that the pioneers knew exactly how social work education - or for that matter, social work, should look. Their domain was called "philanthropy" and they had a dual heritage: the "practical" work in the AICPs, COSs, children's programs, and corrections - and in many other programs - on the one side - and the social investigations, reform, and emerging social science, on the other. But their energies were considerable, they were clearly a very able lot and in the context of the Progressive Era, through World War I, their approach was empirical and optimistic. Moreover, they set up extraordinarily effective networks and communication links. The story, particularly the academic side, is told in great detail and with rich quotations from correspondence, committee reports and published papers by Dr. Betty P. Broadhurst (1971) in her remarkable but unpublished doctoral dissertation ("with distinction") at this School. Since the history is very relevant to an understanding of where the schools began, and what needed to be accomplished subsequently, it is essential to summarize some highlights - even if this limits detail in the discussion of later eras.

We are talking of the period before modern social science and its differentiations had taken its shape, when for many of its early leaders the mission was research to clarify and then solve social problems, develop broad social reform, achieve effective administration of philanthropy. A new "scientific" education was being introduced into American universities, markedly different from the classical, and featuring economics, history and psychological development as fields of study. A convening point for those who had begun the shift from traditional descriptive, deductive and speculative approaches concerning social problems and what would today be called "social policy" to what Broadhurst (p. 1) calls a "scientific formulation" was the American Social Science Association (ASSA), founded in 1865. This was not yet one of the learned societies, loci of an empirical methodology, that were to come. But it was a meeting ground for identification and clarification of differences among what we would now consider to be (a) a learned society, (b) a forum for objective study of problems and practices, and (c) the organization concerned with "practical" philanthropic work in agencies. From the ASSA eventually came the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (1874) and other specialized groups in prison work, public health, and urban planning as well as the American Historical Association and the American Economic Association. Its discussions were a major spur to the development of sociology as a social science in the U.S.

And it was at the John Hopkins in 1876 that the new type of social science school developed and attained its great impact. The operating unit was a professor who carried out social investigations, used his research as a base for teaching and documented findings through publication. In the Progressive Era these were reformers who considered planned change possible. Some were "radicals" with regard to the economic system, as well. And these new social science scholars sent their own students into the field to collect data and/or to learn by observation. Eventually, some of those students also became COS volunteer "friendly visitors".

Broadhurst describes Hopkins as the "mother house", creating intellectual colonies which spread knowledge and enthusiasm for modern social science investigation and instruction and for student observation and data gathering to Wisconsin, Chicago, Ohio, Boston, Stanford and at least another dozen colleges and universities before World War I. Philip W. Ayres, who went from Hopkins to Cincinatti and then Chicago, (carrying knowledge of Ely's experience with field placements at Hopkins), arrived in New York in 1897 committed to the Summer School in Philanthropy and, as assistant director of New York COS, became the School's first program director.[2]

But the School, an activity of the COS, was committed by the Kennedy endowment as much to United Charities, AICP, United Hebrew Charities, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and a Columbia relationship as to the COS itself. Kennedy had elected to encourage ties with the "practical charity work of the city" rather than establishment of an university department.

How were these two streams, universities and operating charities, to come together when the domain and scope of activity of what would eventually be known as "social work" was yet to be discovered?

From the practical side there was the influence of Zilpha Smith, with long staff training experience in Boston, Anna Dawes, also from Massachusetts, and Mary Richmond in Baltimore and then Philadelphia. To personify the connection between the research and the practical work, there was Amos Warner.

It would take us too far afield to speculate about why the John Hopkins did not establish the first or any social work school and why one did not develop in Wisconsin or at Stanford despite important lecture series by the pioneers under the developing social science programs. Amos Warner, one of the most impressive of the Hopkins graduates, had become the general agent of the Baltimore COS while completing his Ph.D. at Hopkins - a new-breed economist-social researcher who was interested in the practical. His American Charities (1894), a compilation of the new studies of charities and social problems, became the first social work text. Warner took what we might call the new applied social science path. Mary Richmond took over in Baltimore, groomed by Gilman, but not in the social science model. Eventually, she traveled to Philadelphia COS in 1900. Her Friendly Visiting Among the Poor (1898) was the second text used by the pioneer Summer School in Philanthropy from 1899. There we have it: social science guided prevention and social reform and the guide to the "case by case" work of charity.

The Summer School in Philanthropy's lecturers were leaders of charity departments and organizations, public officials, university faculty (some from other cities) - and people like Mary Richmond who traveled to New York from the beginning. By 1909 the new, philanthropically-oriented Russell Sage Foundation had brought Richmond to New York to head its Charity Organization department. She thus remained heavily engaged in lecturing at the School and influencing its policies.

The many lecturers were not paid between 1898-1907 and there were as many as 75 different people involved in 1906-07. By 1907-08, there were small honoraria (but not for summer lecturers or COS staff). The first full-time salary went to Mary G. Worthington, appointed in 1908 as the supervisor of the field work program. The field work component had gradually expanded and been formalized. The director argued that the students "shall spend relatively more time in the actual doing of philanthropic work under skilled direction and supervision than in lectures about it". The placements were as frequently related to housing, factories, and child labor reform as to individual work (Meier, pp. 25, 28, 35).

The social work school was yet to be invented. The new school in New York had to discover how to bring together in an organized program the training at the practical side with the learning about society, people, social problems that came from the new academic work. And it was more than a "theory" versus "practice" issue. It was also a question of mission. The first students were interested in the direct practical work in COSs and children's agencies or in administration of social programs. That is, many of them were. Others had broader institutional and social reform goals rather than planning to work with individual families. No choice had been made between these two streams and the notion of such choice had not been posed when the School was launched. The balance in favor of what came to be known as "case work" over what was generalized initially as "community organization" evolved only over a considerable period of time.

To illustrate, when the full-year of study was instituted, the School listed itself as preparing students for service as:

(We shall note subsequently how much the list was to change.)[3]

Important leaders, practitioners, and professors from all streams gave individual lecturers or several lectures on the subjects in which they specialized. School leadership attempted to suggest continuities.

One should not romanticize. One of the field's educational pioneers, writing about her experience in another school in the earliest days, has said "...most of the courses were series of lectures on one subject given by almost as many different people as there were sessions in the series. One looks in vain for any semblance of a curriculum or an integrated program of study." She adds: "Fortunately, the early leaders of the field laid a groundwork on which we should be able to build for many years to come. They recognized the necessity of preparing students to render the direct services for which people come to social agencies, to understand the findings of social research...and to participate in efforts to modify the social conditions which are inimical to the growth and development of the individual." (Wright, 1954a, 1954b). All of this applied in New York, as well.

By 1910-11 much progress had been made. Instead of a series of lectures integrated by the director or a chair, there were regular courses meeting once or twice a week. There was a full-time faculty. There had been a "shakedown" of topics, too. (For example, cooking and public speaking were dropped as the curriculum focus was sharpened.) Students went on field visits, excursions, and carried brief agency case assignments under several patterns. In our current sense, curriculum and field work had to be shaped over the years, first for the summer school (1898), then the one-year school (1904), and then two-year program (1911). Most admitted students had B.A. degrees or "equivalent" experience, so the work was defined as graduate. From the beginning there was reciprocity between the School and Columbia which allowed free course enrollment and the earning of an academic MA with the social work diploma. But the content of the teaching of what would now be called "practice" needed to be invented.

The period from 1898 to 1920 holds a fascinating story of trial and error, teamwork, learning from research (Social Diagnosis by Richmond, 1917, reflected a systematic research process), experimentation, formulation and reformulation as the school began to identify:

We have reproduced in Appendix B the report by the School's director of the third summer's lectures, field observation and trips, and other activities. By 1904 the students could (according to the Bulletin) choose among 41 lecture courses grouped under these headings (but hardly a coherent classification scheme):


A Two-Year Curriculum: To the 1950s


Our review of the development of a concept of curriculum requires some mention of values and attitudes. Later, the Deweyite, Eduard Lindeman (1922; also Gessner, ed., 1936) was to formulate and teach his democratic ethic. But as the two year program was launched, Devine introduced one of his several essay collections, The Spirit of Social Work (1911), with the following:

One of the extraordinary developments of the opening decade of the twentieth century is the extent to which the multitude of social workers, engaged in various occupations, enrolled under various banners, have made mutual discovery of one another's existence, have become aware of one another's common aims and aspirations. They have found themselves, so to speak, and in doing so have found that this social point of view, this mutual interest in social work, differentiates them not only from the exploiter but from the neutral and indifferent member of society.

This new view of life and of human relations is at once conservative, constructive, and wholesome; radical, revolutionary, and disturbing; absolutely non-partisan, catholic, and social; comprehensive in its grasp and yet sternly practical and acquainted with the humility of the scientific and inquiring mind. It is a view which tempts to no violence and yet leaves no wrong permanently on the throne; a view which exalts the family, the state, religion, security of life and of property, and yet insists that all institutions are made for men and not men for institutions; a view which opens our eyes to the evils which are, but yet does not seek to make them, in some mystical sense, symbols of imaginary evils which are not.

Social workers are not Utopians. They are sober citizens of a real commonwealth. Yet the community which they have in their mind's eye, as the not too distant goal of their diversified and yet co-ordinated endeavors, is one in which the premature death shall have been conquered, in which feeble-mindedness shall have been abolished, in which childhood shall be protected and nourished, in which neither men nor women shall be exploited for gain, in which toil though it may still be severe will not be destructive, in which heredity and environment shall be joined in a holy wedlock of which high physical and moral character shall be the offspring, in which there shall be leisure and opportunity for the growth of the spirit, in which always and everywhere men shall rule things, being worth to rule and under no domination save that of loyalty to the highest and best that the mind of man has conceived.

At the heart of the School is the curriculum. The basic architecture evolved over the first 50 years.

First, it was necessary to go from a large roster to a core. The early lists included an extraordinary range of activities and career goals just as the early National Conference of Charities and Corrections could claim a very broad domain which in a few decades would experience spin-offs and more consensus about focus. The School was sensitive to agency demands for staff, student interests, and successive faculty conceptualizations of curriculum as the society evolved and the decades passed.

Thus, the gradually evolving curriculum concept: what needed to be taught? How shall the curriculum be structured?

The remainder of the section offers illustration and selective highlights, 1910 to 1950, by which time the curriculum "architecture" was apparent.

As the two-year diploma program was implemented and there was a substantial full-time faculty, an attempt was made to define for the first year material basic for all social work (known for a while as "pre-vocational"), while the second year was to be elective and vocational. As you know a distinction along these lines has persisted, although the vocabulary has changed.

By the end of World War I, as put by Meier, "two large divisions of social work were seen - that of working with individuals and families and that of working towards social betterment through mass programs of social legislation and social action" (Meier, 1954, p. 55). Extraordinary progress had been made in conceptualizing case work and how it would be taught. These had been and remained co-equal tracks in the School during the Progressive Era developmental years. When the Charities and Commons magazine of the COS launched its reform oriented monumental survey of Pittsburgh, the prototypical industrial city of immigrants and company towns of the late 19th century, eight of fourteen investigators were or were soon to be associated with the School, the survey director was Paul Kellog who had taken part in the summer program, and the School's courses on labor and industry made extensive use of the rich reports. Faculty members were among those active in the large social survey movement which was to follow.

The adapting and shaping continued. To jump ahead: according to the 1923-24 School Bulletin, courses were organized by five departments:

These were described as the "five major fields of professional social work", each leading to a diploma. About half the time in earning the diplomas was being spent in field work; the class-field distinction was not considered a theory-practice division since "the two are combined in courses at school and in the field" (p.7).

This, however, does not fully detail the range of subject matter (1924-25 General Announcement, April, 1924). By the end of the third quarter (first year) a student also was required to choose a "major field" for specialty concentration in the second year, meaning both field work and a special seminar:

family casework

research,

child placing

statistics,

institutional supervision

personnel administration,

juvenile delinquency

factory inspection

visiting teaching

  

hospital social work

  

psychiatric social work

  

penal, reformatory, detention work

  

parole

  

social organization

  

rural organization

  

recreation organization

  

Some of the earliest fields of practice (as we would now name them) that were eventually to disappear were still present until the 30s; others had already disappeared or decreased. Criminology has its own "professional" apparatus; industrial social work ended during the New Deal as "company unionism" only to be reborn under Reaganism. The methods were direct service, community development/prevention - in our terms. And the Department of Social Case Work - the largest by far - had begun to distinguish family case work, psychiatric case work, medical social work, and child welfare.

But the constantly present thrust to integration and the generic prevented full triumph of centrifugal forces (Berstein, pp. 50-52). The dean, Porter Lee, Professor Mary Hurbult and Mary Antonnette Cannon were moving forces in the Milford Conference (1923-1929) and Lee and Cannon were principal drafters of Social Case Work, Generic and Specific (AASW, 1929), a major document in the profession's history. (Hurbult had left to work abroad). The conclusions about the existence of a generic casework method shaped thinking at the School and curriculum changes early in the 1930s, even though the depression, the refugee situation, the war work deferred full curricular reform until the late 40s.

Beginning in the 1920s, training for child guidance work was expanded through the Bureau of Child Guidance (1922-23), a service agency and training center created at the School by a Commonwealth Fund delinquency experiment. A second project (1928-33) created an Institute for Child Guidance with a large program of social work, psychologist, and psychiatrist training. Dr. Berman Glueck who came to the School in 1918 was the first director of the Bureau of Children's Guidance and Dr. Marion Kenworthy, who came in 1921 was his associate. When Glueck resigned in 1924, Kenworthy took over and was a major force at the School until her 1956 retirement, the first psychiatrist in a full-time position in a social work school. In 1929, Porter Lee, the dean and a case work teacher and Kenworthy co-authored Mental Hygiene and Social Work, the first psychiatric case work text.

New personnel on the faculty and many new electives represented the beginning of a curriculum development which, after World War II, involved basic courses in human growth and development for all students. Until then, the psychology and psychiatry were chose by the students who after World War I were being prepared for V.A. work with veterans in psychiatric programs, those in criminology and, then, child guidance. Always something of an élite status, psychiatric social work had become increasingly popular. The idea was accepted that psychiatry belonged in a foundation core along with some social science material and medical information. Contrary to some accounts, an eclectic psychiatric and psychological theory mix was available and the psychoanalytic monopoly was a phenomenon of the 1940s.

Thus the areas of attention in the curriculum both narrowed and grew. Social reform became community organization in its more narrow sense and direct work with individuals and families predominated. Group work was added as an option in the late 1920s with a developmental and socialization emphasis, and attracted a significant group in the 1930s. It added a therapeutic sub-specialty in the 1950s. (Later, in the 1970s, casework and group work came together in what is now known as "clinical practice", in recognition of the family as a "group" and the experience that even the practitioners who concentrate on intensive individual work cannot manage without some group competence.)

To sum up the formulation of the 30s, the School Bulletin for 1932-33 explains the offerings as follows:

In the School's curriculum work of the late 1940s, the Milford Conference notion that there was a generic core to all casework became the point of departure for another concept which had been mentioned earlier but was not enacted: there is a generic core to all social work. Now the idea of a foundation of required work for all students was standardized. The notion of the specialty chosen by the student on top of the foundation (the second year?) was to evolved and fluctuate among method, field of practice, professional functions.

Finally, the 1952-53 Bulletin sums up the post-War curriculum review. The considerable separation of courses of study by field of practice had given way to an integrated concept:

The process over five decades have reflected a sharpening, if narrowing, conception of social work, working out of a class-field balance, a differentiation by method (casework, group work, community organization, administration) and conviction about a large generic core. The next four decades added new elements to the mix.

So it went. A changing society, a developing profession, an evolving curriculum. The School was highly respected, its graduates were in demand, its faculty was rich in national leadership, their books were widely used as texts. In 1950, 91 of 517 full-time faculty members in accredited schools of social work were New York School alumni, as were 20 of 53 deans, a proportion probably never again reached, given the general expansion of social work education. A full assessment of all this would require an ambitious research undertaking, but much "case" evidence of New York School's impact is at hand.

The Faculty Behind the Curriculum


The School was fortunate in its faculty from the beginning. In a bootstrap operation, the School built its faculty out of the social science stream as described above, the field of practice - especially COS and state board employees - and from among its own graduates. In a process that was to be repeated in the 1950s and 1960s with the doctoral program, the availability of graduate training had brought to the School highly experienced people who took time out for systematic learning and contemplation. They became leader-teachers, deans, and directors - in New York and elsewhere. New York also was especially fortunate in its directors/deans.

To illustrate - without referring to those with whom I have worked - note the remarkable team of Porter R. Lee, director from 1919, Walter W. Pettit, his associate from the beginning, and Margaret Leal, initially called "Secretary" but a major force in the Administration. Lee, a 1903 "summer school" student, came from the casework practice side, headed several COSs, came to teach in 1912 and introduced the case method of teaching. It was Lee who in 1919 convened the 15 schools that created the American Association of Schools of Social Work. He saw the need for work on conceptualizing and teaching the technical aspects of direct practice. He was a major intellectual force behind the Milford Conference and in the drafting of its report and - in a widely distributed series of writings, especially Social Work as Cause and Function (1937) - prodded the field to think deeply about its mission and its relationship to social change. Walter Pettit (who came in 1915 from the community organization side and had introduced the case method of teaching to c.o.) became director on Lee's death early in 1939 and Margaret Leal became the associate director - and, in 1947, acting dean. In effect, a "dynasty" that provided continuity and strong leadership for almost 30 years. It was Pettit who negotiated the 1940 Columbia affiliation which enabled the School to shift from its "diploma" to the M.S. degree.

Many here will recall the special capacities and the contributions of the subsequent deans. (see Appendix C)

SELECTIVE HIGHLIGHTS FROM TEN DECADES: RESPONDING TO CHANGE,

OCCASSIONALLY HELPING TO SHAPE IT


The hundred years of the "New York School", now the Columbia School, coincide with the hundred years over which the modest and somewhat reluctant American Welfare State was proposed, then launched, developed, expanded, challenged and now forced into new adaptations. Three major periods over this time may be called The Age of Reform (Hofstadter, 1955): The Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society[4]. In the space between them (especially the 1920s, the 1950s) and after them (the 1970s and 1980s), reform became "function" and the new policies and programs were integrated and developed in a flurry of institution-building and professionalization. There were also some retreats.

Social work education, and thus the organized profession, was born out of the major 1893 depression but the ground was laid by the social and intellectual changes of the Gilded Age. Yes, there was the dominance of Social Darwinism, but there was also the challenge of Lester Ward and the Populist tradition. We already have referred to the social science and social welfare developments between the Civil War and the 1890s.

Modern social work, and this School, were a product of the Progressive Era. But the societal context changed in major ways over the years, offering new tasks, obstacles, and opportunities. It was consistent with social work's dominant ideology that the field be open to change. But it is a fair judgment that social work was not one of the powerful forces in society, so its challenge was more often to find the right response for those who depended on it - rather than to move major societal innovation. But, as we should recall, there were exceptions here, too.

On the other hand, this first and always leading School had powerful impact throughout on the profession and on social work education. It was in a central role in the creation of the American Association of Schools of Social Work (AASSW), the deliberations of the Milford Conference, the launching of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW): Nathan Cohen was the first president, Gordon Hamilton was the first editor-in-chief of its new journal, and 5 of the 12 editors-in-chief thus far have been CUSSW faculty members or doctoral graduates. It played a large part, too, in the education of deans, directors and senior professors for the expanding educational community. In the activities that developed the field, its faculty members were leaders: their texts were widely used; they were visible in the conferences, organizations, associations and debates that were to shape the profession's future.

In what follows, I point to some highlights which, at most, are notes for a history yet to be written or fragments of that history assembled by others. There is much more to cover, including relationships with Columbia, with social work, with the world of policy and action, and with the behavioral and social sciences. There were always faculty members and administrators who focused on core curriculum and educational refinements, while others looked at the society and wanted the School to reclaim a stronger reform role. Some of the faculty were national "actors"; others stayed closer to home. The School did not shape the society (what one institution did?) but it had great influence on social work education as it strengthened its own educational offerings.


The First Two Decades: From 1898 to 1918

We have told the story of the beginnings: the summer school and its lectures and lecture series covering the full range of as yet undifferentiated "charities and correction" concerns and we have mentioned the evolving observation and field experience offerings. While very much a COS activity, the School had an ongoing Columbia connection in political economy and, then, sociology from the beginning. Philip Ayres was the director until the one-year School began in 1904 when Edward T. Devine became the head. Both were Ph.D.'s in the new mold, scholars of social problems and reform - and with a commitment to training for "practical" work.

The stream of attention to social conditions led to the establishment at the School in 1906 of a Bureau of Research, a successor to statistics and research committees in the COS. Shortly thereafter, the newly established Russell Sage Foundation gave grants to four year-round schools to support social investigation for the Foundation and, in the New York instance, research training, postgraduate research fellowships and research in Columbia's sociology department (Broadhurst, 1977, pp. 866-867; Bernstein, 1941; pp. 100-102).

After a spurt to 1912, the research activity declined. Broadhurst speculates that this may have been one of the periodic fluctuations in emphasis in the early years between the socioeconomic content and the practical direct work (see below). A young researcher at the Bureau of Social Research concluded her 1909-10 study of "Malnutrition in a Group of 107 School Children in P.S. 51" with the following note: "Until society adjusts itself and provides adequate incomes and adequate education to all its workers...", there must be some recourse to the expedient of temporary relief for poverty. Her professor, the leading economist Simon N. Patten of Pennsylvania, teacher of Devine and Lindsay and lecturer at the School 1904-7 and 1911, 1913, had predicted, in recommending her for the fellowship, that she would "acquire through her energy and brains an important position among social workers." Francis Perkins did not disappoint anybody, first as factory inspector, then as a New York State official, and finally as Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, chairing the committee that wrote the Social Security Act (cited by Meier, 1954, p. 37).

This was the era in which the School was seeking its footing among what was to become differentiated as the social reform and social science materials, on the one hand, and the "practical" work and skills it was established to teach, on the other. In the 1905-6 curriculum, as the one year program began, the emphasis was on work with individuals. In a gradual process, this being the era of muckrakers and social reforms, the courses on economic problems and proposed reforms, sociology and other general required lectures and electives, completely dominated the offerings. While we lack a full accounting of what went on, clearly there were debates, tensions, controversy, which involved administrators, teachers, COS board. Samuel McCune Lindsay, student of Patten, had replaced Devine as director in 1907. His 1912 resignation letter, reprinted by Bernstein (1942, pp. 26-28) refers to communications from Richmond and Glenn and the inability to arrive at agreement on educational policy. To Lindsay, the options were the law school, medical school and Teachers' College (a University graduate professional school) or a "training school, much more limited in scope, devoted to the development of a finer technique in a few lines of work - perhaps exclusively in the activities of a charity organization society"... more like a business college or a nurses' training school in a hospital.

Devine, still director of New York COS, returned to the School's directorship as well. Leading people from the practical end were recruited for what was a growing full-time faculty. The need for technical practice courses was highlighted - and progress was made. (Berengarten, 1987, pp. 2-4 and Note 7). As suggested in our curriculum review, however, Lindsay was not all wrong, in his view of what was going on. By the 1950s, the School looked as much like the model he preferred as the alternative he rejected. This would be a graduate professional school, not narrow vocational training.

The critical accomplishment of these two decades have been mentioned earlier: the progress in conceptualization of case work and how it is to be taught [see Richmond's Social Diagnosis (1917) and What Is Social Casework? (1922)]; the major progress in formulating a curriculum; the recruitment of an exemplary faculty, stable and paid; progress in sorting out what were essential background subjects and what were the techniques. But much remained unresolved.

While many oversimplified accounts describe the COS people as "charitables", unaware of economic context, contesting with settlement "radicals", or assume that all of COS was Social Darwinist, the record shows this to be an exaggeration, if not straight error. Early students were encouraged (and at many points even required) to spend some time visiting or working in settlement houses. Richmond, who experienced the 1893 depression at the Baltimore COS understood and talked about the interdependence of "mass betterment and individual betterment" (Broadhurst citation, p. 529, Richmond papers and Simon, 1994, Ch. 4). Debating those whose curriculum views differed from hers and fearful that the "academic" would overwhelm the "practical" in a university setting, she certainly saw need for both and called for environmental interventions beyond cash assistance (Broadhurst, p. 533).

Devine, the director, worked his views out in changing societal context. Trained by Patten at Pennsylvania, he had adopted the radical Patten views of the economy and called for a more equitable distribution of its economy's surplus "to the people of the community in which it is created" (Devine, 1910, p. 148). His own little book about poverty, in the spirit of the era's distinctions between poverty, the main issue, and pauperism called for development and opportunity in terms which would not have been out of place in Lyndon Johnson's poverty war (1907 essay). He described the social work ideal as securing the recognition of normal standards of comfort, activity and life and "to sweep away the obstacles which prevent the realization of these standards by ordinary human beings."[5]

To the extent that the record here has been reported, the School was apparently not very active - Devine aside - in some of the major Washington social welfare initiatives of the Progressive Era. Devine urged a White House Conference on Children, advocated for the Children's Bureau, was active on child labor reform and anti-tuberculosis efforts. But others, particularly Chicago social workers, were the leaders in the Children's Bureau, juvenile court campaigns, mothers' pension laws and the enactment of the Shepperd-Townsend maternal and child health program. In effect, New York concentrated on the private sector until the 1930s while Chicago put the public in focus - and they debated.

Devine did not escape from his age and held some views that have not fully disappeared in our own day. While poverty is "the larger and more important problem", to be dealt with through social reform, health care, housing, and administration of justice, "pauperism" is biologically primitive, presenting a distinct social problem - as do criminals, prostitutes, inebriates, monopolists, and revolutionaries (emphasis supplied)." He favored segregation but humane treatment of paupers whom he described as often mentally defective, alcoholics, or drug users (1916).

Devine and his colleagues from the academic side were from the beginning active in service on what we would now call the "macro" side - people who could at the call of governors and presidents take on responsible tasks and missions: a Red Cross assignment after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and Ohio floods in 1913. He led Red Cross relief work in France during the War. He helped convince Theodore Roosevelt to call the 1909 White House Conference on Children. (We note, parenthetically, a similar series of roles for social work leaders during the New Deal and during and after World War II and wonder whether it is the field's more recent recruitment patterns or social work's current status that has made such roles - perhaps best exemplified by Harry Hopkins - virtually disappear.)

Devine was only one among the faculty members with special wartime roles. Mary Hurlbutt who joined the faculty in 1914 worked in Czechoslovakia and subsequently had a series of top-level assignments for the National Board of the YMCA and others in the immigration field. She built competence in ethnicity and work with immigrants that served the School well into the 1950s. As much could be said for Clara Kaiser. During the War the School offered a free course for Red Cross emergency services. In 1919, it offered a one-year course for Red Cross Home Services.


The 1920s

In 1919 the School became the New York School of Social Work. Its relationship to New York COS was unchanged. Its ties to Columbia were "less close". This was for the country a time of withdrawal to private concerns, and end of the pre-War reform, if perhaps a "seedtime" for the next wave (Chambers, 1963).

The post-War heritage of casework above the poverty line, e.g. casework where the starting point was not necessarily a relief application, and family casework which explored the psychiatric theme, created an era of great professional development, expansion, and institution building. The national service agencies and social work professional associations took their more mature shape: family welfare, child welfare, school social work, medical social work, travelers' aid, psychiatric social work. It was the era of specialization, enrichment of field work, progress in conceptualizing supervision. As we already have seen, it was an era of major curriculum development at the School.

The survey movement, launched in Pittsburgh, had transferred its major energies from exposure of the societal price of the industrial system to social welfare needs studies. Community welfare planning and coordination became important - and, therefore, grew in the Schools. The New York School recruited, developed new courses, and was clearly in the lead here, too, as it was in casework. It also was among the Schools which began to develop group work.

Then, as the economic problems hit at the end of the decade, faculty reported on the developing economic crisis and the inability of the voluntary sector to cope. Klein looked at the geography of economic need in New York City in his (1932) Some Basic Statistics in Social Work. Klein's (1938) "second" Pittsburgh survey was a comprehensive "needs" study.

Pressed by a heavy flow of applications from the early 20s, a significant increase in the student body was made possible by expansion of space available to the School in the COS building (105 East 22 Street). The Russell Sage Foundation provided a library reading room. Then in 1931 the Foundation completed the building space constructed for it and the School moved across the street (122 East 22 Street) to its own quarters. The next move was to be in 1949.

Lee's important "cause and function" paper at the 1929 National Conference of Social Work (Lee, 1937) is evidence that the School leadership, observing the 1920s, wondered how social work could both retain a societal change commitment, as in the Progressive era, and continue its progress as an established societal institution with standardized administrative and service delivery responsibilities.

The integration of the School's education program with others is exemplified by the fact that by the early 1930s: under defined circumstances some New York School courses were credited at Columbia for M.S. degrees, as they had been from about the beginning; under defined circumstances some NYSSW courses were credited for half the requirements of an M.S. degree at the New York University School of Education; there was a 1925 cooperative arrangement with the Yale Divinity School for a student to earn a B.D. degree and a NYSSW diploma in three academic years, one of which was spent in New York. From the fall quarter in 1925 there also was a cooperative arrangement with the then-existent Training School for Jewish Social Work. Students spent a full year at the New York School, preceded and followed by a summer at the Training School. The joint degree and related "major" arrangements which have been available since the 1970s and 1980s represent an update of these practices.


The New Deal and Its Aftermaths

Immediately available accounts do not document the role of School faculty and administration as the Great Depression deepened and some public leaders and social welfare groups urged a larger public role in responding to the crisis. What is well documented, if not elaborated here, is major service by faculty members and administration in helping Washington, cities, counties and states as they moved to implement both the federal emergency measures and the later provision of the Social Security Act, particularly the public assistance and child welfare titles (Bernstein, pp. 76-77). And, of course, Francis Perkins chaired the Cabinet committee which prepared the Social Security recommendation for President Franklin Roosevelt and James Hoey, awarded her diploma in 1916, was the major federal official charged with implementing the assistance provisions. It is therefore no surprise that the "social investigation" in public welfare came to resemble the COS case study - a practice not questioned at CUSSW until the income transfer discussions and changes of the late 1960s and 1970s.

On the curriculum side, public welfare appeared slowly, focused on public-private roles and it was late in the 1930s (1936-37) before there was a full array of courses about the new programs and public welfare administration. One new course, called "Government and Social Welfare" was the first required offering designed to acquaint all students with the new public safety net. Among the instructors were Robert Lansdale, subsequently the New York State Welfare Commissioner and David Adie, who taught part-time while holding the Commissioner post.

If the core curriculum was only gradually impacted, there being little expectation at the time of a larger movement of diploma graduates to these new public programs, there was a major in-service, part-time, evening-course effort to upgrade the large group of new civil servants who had been recruited to staff programs in New York and neighboring states.

But the nature of the change was increasingly appreciated and discussed. During most of the 1930s the School's General Announcement (Bulletin) devoted one issue each year to a report of that year's alumni conference. The May 18, 1933 conference dealt with "Constructive Planning in Retrenchment". Communities were feeling the Depression. The alumni issue of July 1934 featured a conference keynote by Ruth Taylor, Commissioner of Public Welfare in Westchester County who made her message clear: I am speaking of permanent public welfare developments." (emphasis added). The October, 1935 Bulletin carried a report of M. Antoinette Cannon's year of leave working for the Texas Relief Commission: "An Experiment in Providing Instruction for Relief Workers". The July 1937 alumni conference report is one of the few indicators, apart from the publication by the School of Fisher's book, that the social work radical "rank and file" movement (Fisher, 1936) was being heard at the New York School. The workshop topics were: workers' education in the WPA, social change and social casework; group work; government responsibility for social welfare; social action.

The intellectual ferment created in casework by its new role in public welfare and the new worker-client-agency configuration will be covered by others in the program - including the diagnostic-functional schism in which the New York School carried the diagnostic view lead. Gordon Hamilton's (1940) Theory and Practice of Social Casework confronts the application of the casework method as it had been developed during the 1930s to the new social welfare world. It became the leading text for its era.

The New Deal changed the School in other ways as well. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) financed a considerable expansion of social work education to meet the needs of the new programs. Registration at all schools peaked in the fall of 1934. The New York School grew. Moreover, a process underway for some years was much accelerated: the gradual change of the social class composition of the student body to include more from lower middle class and working class backgrounds and more males. This process was reinforced immediately after World War II as well.

Finally, shortly after Porter Lee's death, Walter Pettit, the director, completed the long-explored process of affiliation with Columbia. The inheritance of the 1890s had never fully disappeared but by then the AASSW had decreed that all new members required university affiliation. New York had been "grandfathered" in. As of October 6, 1940, the School became formally affiliated with Columbia University. Thereafter (and for some people retroactively) the M.S. degree took the place of the diploma. The University Council (on which there was now School representation) assumed jurisdiction over the School's course of study. Two Columbia professors joined the School Council. Columbia's president became ex officio President of the School. But all of this was continuous with the past. The School had long listed itself as "conducted by the Charity Organization Society of New York". Now it was the NYSSW "of the Community Service Society of New York", the COS having joined with AICP to create the CSS.


The War Years and the 1950s

The General Announcement for 1942-43 state that "the faculty is engrossed with considerations affecting the responsibility of the profession with respect to the War" and will "strive to maintain standards". Individual faculty members and students took on war-related assignments, again a subject requiring fuller documentation. The School protected the integrity of the two-year program while implementing a special program for workers with War leaves. The "community organization" faculty was involved in the needed social service developments in war-impacted communities. Dr. Marion Kenworthy, in her role as consultant to the Surgeon General of the United States, was influential in the development of a special classification for military social work, something that had been achieved by psychology in World War I. Further, her extensive correspondence with her former students, now in the military, offered very effective stimulation and support as these students developed, tested and taught the new social work roles in several branches of the military (Maas, 1951).

Leiby (1978, p. 352) interprets the professionalization of the 1950s as resuming a process diverted by the New Deal and the War. Certainly this was the case at the New York School.

The new faculty cohort of the late 1940s and the 1950s was proportionately more male and had more doctoral-level trained people than earlier cohorts as well as people with training and experience in military social work, Veteran Administration psychiatric programs, child guidance - and in research and social science. Welcomed by their senior colleagues, the veterans of the development of earlier decades, many of them giants in the field, the new arrivals participated in a series of curriculum development and curriculum change processes which shaped the subsequent decades. If the Progressive Era, the Depression and New Deal and the War years were periods of change and ferment, the 1920s and the 1950s (as already suggested) were periods of curriculum and practice development and education advancement. The School concentrated on improving and enriching itself and, in the process, had major impacts on social work and social work education. Here the occasion permits only a summary listing since the alternative would be an additional extended essay:

This also was the era in which doctoral training came to the School. It was long discussed. The major faculty members in the several relevant fields constituted a formidable core. Eveline M. Burns, who came to the School in 1946 was already known and respected in School and University. In July, 1943, she had talked to the Alumni Conference about "Security, Work, and Relief Policies", the major economic and social planning report for which she had taken the lead at the (short-lived) National Resources Planning Board. Her social security assignments had been highly respected. Once on the faculty, Burns was assigned the lead in the exploration and negotiation of a Doctor of Social Welfare degree. Columbia's Ph.D. was and is awarded only by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The social work degree was designed to parallel the Ph.D. requirements and the specifics were negotiated with the Executive Committee of that faculty. Moreover, Arts and Sciences was built into the educational, examination and dissertation process. However, the social work faculty decided that a Doctor of Social Welfare (DSW) would do more for the status of social work than a Ph.D. The permission to develop a program was given in 1946, implemented in 1950, and the first degree was awarded in 1952. Eight social work schools already offered the doctorate at the time. After a slow start, the program hit its degree-granting pace in 1959-60 and was soon awarding half the social work doctorates in the country. Its graduates became influential faculty members and deans in leading schools. The scale of influence changed only as, in subsequent decades, many schools began to offer doctorates and the numbers grew substantially. Almost 50 years after the degree's inception, a shift was made to the Ph.D., with little curriculum change, because of the importance of a standard degree in the academic culture and the alleged competitive disadvantage which had evolved for the DSW.

But for the 1950s and 60s, the doctoral program led to a much closer School relationship with the University than ever. Students and faculty were exposed to the considerable social science ferment at Columbia, especially in sociology. This was no small factor in some of the developments already described.

The Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) which had been important to the School in setting up the 1906 research center, which had taken on the original Pittsburgh survey as that survey followed an ambitious agenda, which had provided a reading room and then a building and its library to the School in the 1930s, which had enriched the program from the beginning by making its many staff specialists in labor, surveys, charity organization and many other fields available as lecturers and teachers, also made a major contribution to the doctoral program. In 1956, as part of a broader program intended to bring together the social professions and the social sciences in mutually beneficial interaction, the Foundation funded the recruitment of several social scientists each at the New York School and the Michigan School of Social Work and funded doctoral fellowship programs in each. This program brought to the New York School, for various periods, Lloyd Ohlin, criminologist, the collaborator with Richard Cloward in the 60s (see below), James Bieri, clinical psychologist, Robert Bush, statistician, Eugene Litwak and Lee Wiggins, sociologists, Katherine Spencer, the anthropologist who was important to Stein's work. The RSF also provided fellowships to Howard Polsky, Hope Leichter (Teachers' College) and Otto Pollack (Jewish Board of Guardians) whose important work helped stimulate the entire social science development and encourage the integration of behavioral and social science and the attention to a wider range of personality theories than had been the case earlier.

During this period, the "research center" joined class and field as a major program vehicle at the School. We have already mentioned the initial 1907-1912 effort funded by Russell Sage but it did not continue. Several faculty members had significant projects in the periods before and after World War I, especially Kate Claghorn, long the sole full-time research instructor, and Philip Klein, a 1913 graduate who joined the faculty in 1927. Another five year effort under a research department headed by Klein continued from 1927-32 and carried out several explorations designed to build knowledge for use in the curriculum (Bernstein, 1942, p. 104ff). Klein also served as research director for the White House Conference on Children, 1939-40. Now, in the 50s, a new initiative heralded the School's changed relationship to the University and its commitment to scholarship on a par with that of academic social science departments. The process began in the fall of 1956 when an anonymous donor made the first of two grants to create a research center. The fund ensured the infrastructure for eight years but the program was to be project-driven. Through a series of projects and a number of leading faculty members as directors, the center developed a strong record. It facilitated financing, implementation, and access to the education program of projects over a wide range of topics. For example, the Report to the Dean for 1960-61, listed 11 projects underway, or about to begin, funded by a diversity of sources, each autonomous with its own director. The Center also played a role as a training base for MSW and DSW students.

In the `60s, the center was renamed the Center for Research and Demonstration as a series of demonstrations was added to the research mission (the Experimental Welfare Center, the Bird S. Coler demonstration of a medical social service program in a hospital for the chronically ill). The Center continued to play its umbrella facilitating role until superseded by a series of autonomous centers which continued to keep the School in the forefront of several areas of research and demonstrations (see below). It remains on the organization chart but is no longer an operating entity.

Under the direction of Sidney Berengarten and with the sponsorship of Marion Kenworthy, the School was the site from 1947 to 1954 of a "Pilot Study on Selection of Students". A series of three interviews was conducted with each applicant in an effort to identify the presence of "personality equipment...suited to professional growth and the assimilation of theory and technique". Project staff felt that they had learned a good deal and there was sharing with other Schools and, eventually, the creation of a national roster of interviewers. The approach was eventually dropped in view of changed admission requirements and recruitment policy (Berengarten, 1986).

A full record of the School's social service and income security commitments and aspirations in the 1950s is reported in National Policies for Education, Health, and Social Services (Russell, 1955), the record of a Columbia Bicentennial Conference for which the School assembled an impressive roster of U.S. and international scholars and public officials. The proposals are "liberal" in the New Deal sense, pro-Welfare State, and carry a view of social work continuous with the broad conceptions of 1898. Nathan Cohen's summary concludes that the social worker must not only be skillful in the diagnosis and treatment of the individual and group problems met in day to day practice but also must be able to speak with knowledge and understanding of the wider social issues involved and the possible courses of action and development for society as a whole (Ibid., p. 240).

The 50s, then, was a period of academic progress, integration into the University community and - fittingly - in 1950 the full separation from the Community Service Society and the receipt (1951) of a charter from the New York State Board of Regents. In 1959 the School entered the Columbia Corporation and transferred its endowment and some component of autonomy. For several years thereafter it was known as "The New York School of Social Work of Columbia University". In 1962 it was renamed as the "Columbia University School of Social Work". The 50's had positioned it for the Great Society.


The Poverty War and the Great Society

The 60s was a period of major cultural transformation and a social policy watershed (Chalmers, 1991; Journal of Policy History, 1996). The changes began with J.F. Kennedy and continued through the first Nixon term. The School's closest prior association with political activism after the Progressive Era had been the involvement of some of its faculty and alumni with the social work "rank and file" movement of the depression years and the radical social work unionism before World War II. Now there was awareness and some support of the increasingly militant civil right movement, then the Poor People's movement and finally the anti-Vietnam War protests of the decade.

The School's first policy response to the Kennedy Administration was a project supported by the Marshall Field Foundation whose results were eventually published under the title Public Welfare: Time for Change (Wickenden and Bell, 1961). At a time of attacks on ADC as encouraging illegitimacy and malingering, the project probed many of the debated aspects of public assistance policy and developed recommendations for major reform. Its report contributed to the case for what became the 1962 amendments to the Social Security Act, converting Aid for Dependent Children to Aid to Families with Dependent Children and increasing funding for public welfare services.

This effort - a policy-analytic and program development strategy - was characteristic of Burns' earlier work and of subsequent policy efforts by faculty. The Poverty War generated a quite different process. Here, the School's greatest influence was in helping to shape the Poverty War's program strategy - community action - which in turn supported considerable militant action with regard to welfare, education, health, housing and the other systems critical to poor people. This is not the place for detail but we note the national influence of the Mobilization for Youth (MFY) program, a research/demonstration effort in delinquency, which eventually developed into a prototype for the Poverty War community action program. The MFY legal services program, later free-standing, also had enormous national impact. Other related projects were located at the School: Peace Corps and Vista training, especially. Out of these activities came a new model for community organization - a shift to grass roots organizing and "cause-directed advocacy", away from the citizen enabling, consensus building, and local community planning that had characterized traditional social work community organization (Kahn, 1960). The School leadership for these programs (Richard Cloward, Francis Piven, George Brager, James Hackshaw, Mitchell Ginsberg) made major marks on national developments.

One spin-off from the Peace Corps training experience was a several year exchange relationship between CUSSW and the social work schools of Columbia, South America.

The rapid changes and institutional realignments of the era led the School into other experiments and evaluations: an experimental welfare center in the Bronx, responsibility for operation of a medical social service program in a hospital for the chronically ill (Bird S. Coler) and at the Harlem Hospital Center. These projects had both program developmental and training facets. The welfare center and Bird S. Coler program were discontinued after several years: "insurmountable administrative complexities" led to the reconsideration. The Harlem program was later cut back and modified.

As for the rest of the Great Society, the monumental series of social legislative initiatives which constituted the third stage in the shaping of the American welfare state after the Progressive Era and the New Deal, here faculty were monitors of developments and sometimes individually or in their various associations expressed themselves in the policy debates, but were not shapers of the new social provision and safety nets: Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Medicare, Medicaid, Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Higher Education Act, Food Stamps, Model Cities, Older Americans Act, and (later) the indexing of Social Security and the development of the Supplemental Security Income program. Nonetheless, these developments were rapidly incorporated into social policy teaching and students were helped to understand the new commitments of the society and the new opportunities and rights of their clients.

The activist environment of the Great Society, especially as the war protest phase accelerated, inevitably made educational institutions, defined as part of the "establishment", targets of their students as well. After a series of campus confrontations in the spring of 1968 and a one-week class strike, social work faculty and students negotiated a series of agreements involving "sharply increased student participation in the policy-making bodies of the School, an acceleration of the recruitment of minority students and faculty members, and curriculum innovations" (Berengarten, 1967-69, p. 1).

By the fall of 1968 there were courses in black and Puerto Rican culture. A massive recruitment effort over the next period expanded very substantially minority representation in the student body. The governance reform took a bit longer but gave the student organization a significant role which persists after 30 years. (Similar reforms have been phased out over the years in many other faculties). In addition, a series of Task Forces developed recommendations in all areas of curriculum which reflected the new policy context and cultural milieu of the late 1960s. (Berengarten, Ibid.)

The School's internal program did not give up its long-range continuities, however. For example: a large grant from the U.S. Children's Bureau in mid-1964 led to the establishment of the Child Welfare Research Project under David Fanshel, initially, to conduct a major developmental study of foster care, but then to carry out a series of separately funded studies and spin-off studies involving Fanshel, Shirley Jenkins, and a group of outstanding child welfare researchers whom they recruited. Continuing a tradition that went back to Henry Thurston in the 1920s and continued with Leontine Young, Elizabeth Meier, Carole Meyer, Brenda McGowan, and Mary Goldson, this work had major impact on child welfare policy, practice, and training.

The expanded and more rigorous practice research of the late 1950s continued and was extraordinarily productive in the 1960s. At the center of this development were Florence Hollis and a number of Columbia doctoral graduates who worked both at Columbia and elsewhere. There was renewed support for the social work clinical-researcher role and for more eclectic practice models (Berengarten, 1993).

Among the other curriculum developments of the 60s was the final transition in the concept of the policy training in the M.S. program from "Government and Social Welfare" to "Social Policy and Social Welfare".

The 1970s

If we think of the Great Society as extending through the Nixon first term, a notion justified by the policy developments and the scale of public social welfare expenditure, the 70s was a brief period - Nixon's second term, including Gerald Ford's administration, and the Carter years. Yet for the School, as for social welfare generally and social work education, these were busy years. The work of the 60s, realigning social work and social work education with new programs and ideologies, continued and there was no sharp delineation from the earlier era.

Although a Center for Research and Development remained as a token overhead structure, a process began in the 60s was accelerated: now externally funded discrete specialized programs, centers, or projects covered a wide-range of fields and missions, and several positioned the School in a leadership role in the U.S. or sometimes internationally - and often beyond the social work profession itself. While its educational functions of course continued as the School's central mission, several of these programs became major components of the institution, in its place in social welfare. Space constraints permit only a one-time roster here and we shall not list faculty leadership or those who joined the School in connection with these activities. The School's Bulletin for 1979-1980 provides one such a convenient listing. A more recent illustration is included subsequently:

Aging project;

Adoption training project;

Drug use projects;

* Cross–National Studies (of social service systems and family policy);

* Industrial Social Welfare Center;

Working mothers’ research project.

Several were time-limited projects. The two marked with (*) remained active in the 90s as their developing programs received renewed and new funding. The Industrial Social Welfare Center, focused on the World of Work, created widespread interest and became the center of a national development in schools of social work, reviving a social work practice field which has closed down during the New Deal. The Cross-National Studies program was in a visible leadership role here and in Europe in clarifying and creating interest in comparative family policy.

The community organization concentration, propelled by the MFY experience, had shifted to training for activist organizing and advocacy in the 1970s. It was a program concentration at the School early in the 70s. However, by the late 70s, paid jobs for graduates of the concentration had dwindled. Grass-roots leaders and participants had taken over the role. As mentioned earlier, the group work concentration had been combined with casework in a direct practice sequence, as practice teachers learned from their experience that "caseworkers" often had to work with families as a whole and other types of groups.

The agency realignments and new student interests led to a further curricular reconceptualization of methods in the mid 1970s. The academic year 1974-1975 saw a transition to a system of three concentration: I. the "study of concepts, principles, and methods of social casework, social group work, and community organizing which are essential to provision of social services to individuals, families and groups"; "II. ...concepts, principles, and methods applicable to community organizing, program and social policy development,...coordination and administration; "III... for the student who seeks a profession research career in social work". At the same time, the "advanced standing" (after undergraduate social work study) and "reduced residency" )experienced social workers and those with degrees in related fields) statuses were recognized.

Within a year or two a sharper distinction was needed between those who wanted intensive clinical experience (I), those essentially headed to careers in planning or administration (II) and those people who wished to be generalists (III) - basic direct service and program development. The option for research majors remained. These distinctions persist - with an even sharper focus in I on clinical practice.

Especially interesting, the mid-1940s stress on the generic-generalist in training after an era of full specialization in course sequences by field of practice was now once again reversed. Electives apart, students were now required to select a field of practice platform course and a field-of-practice-related methods course as a degree requirement. This development was generated by the demands of employing agencies, the proliferation of "fields", as a consequence of the expanding number of categorical service programs developed as part of the Great Society expansions and by subsequent Congressional action from the 70s (to today). Moreover, faculty had come to believe that generic theory must also include a "theory of practice specifics", e.g. a theory of how abstract, general notions are applied to real programs and service systems (Kahn, 1965; Kamerman, 1995).

The Field of Practice/Social Problem Area listing in the 1979-1980 Bulletin (p. 18) serves to illustrate. (The most recent of the periodic updatings appears subsequently.)

Health and mental health (including mental retardation);
Family and children's services;
Aging;
Corrections and court services;
Drug addiction and alcoholism;
Industrial social welfare;
Education.

By far, the first two covered the majority of the students. It was generally understood that unless "mental health" meant only psychiatric programs, it could be applied as well to many programs in the other "fields" but the internal alignments among faculty and growing practice in the field made the designation a convenience - if a bit ambiguous.

An evolution in practice theory and in the relationship of that theory to behavioral science had begun at the School in the late 50s and was to reshape the 1970s and 1980s. Here I merely note it, on the assumption that the paper by Dr. Martha Dore later this morning will offer the specifics and her assessment. What it meant to the School, among other things, was more diverse recruitment, valuable internal debates about "models" and "paradigms", broader offerings to students, and great richness in the range of externally funded research.

Those elements of School ideology and value systems which were reflected in the 40s and 50s in strong commitment to humane and effective public social services and to a strong social work presence in public programs, were not supportive of the spreading private practice (largely of casework counseling and treatment). There also was the opposition that grew out of conviction that social work should not give up its commitment to institution-based group practice and a tradition of accountable supervision. This did not change when the professional association, NASW, dropped its opposition and created a vehicle for private practitioner interchange in the late 1960s. Thus throughout the 1970s, despite evidence of growing private practice of social work nationally and even among our graduates, there was no place in the School curriculum in which either related practical or ethical issues were discussed - a kind of pluralistic ignorance. Indeed, leading members of the faculty often expressed disapproval and doctoral applicants for the advanced practice sequence did not list private practice as a professional objective. It was well into the 1980s before the overwhelming reality had its impact. NASW's newspaper was actively reporting all that the association was doing to protect the "third-party payments" status of private practitioner social workers. Going well beyond direct treatment, private free-standing practitioners were offering many other services (advice, consultation, contact-reports about one's elderly parents in other states, Alzheimer day groups, etc.) There is now present in all conversation at the School a realistic sense of the role of private practice in student plans and career pathways but the curriculum is not explicity impacted nor has there been a decision that it should be. Unlike some social work doctoral programs, Columbia's does not prepare for the direct service (psychotherapeutic) practitioner role; its emphasis is on the scholar-researcher of direct practice, on the teacher, sometimes on the administrator. The privatization initiatives of the Reagan-Bush years placed the entire private practice development in national context but - as of the late 90s - it is yet to be dealt with at CUSSW explicitly.

On the other hand, the events of the late 60s and early 70s had created strong conviction about multi-disciplinary practice, and the delivery systems were elaborating new roles and new forms of team work. A joint degree program for M.S. students with Columbia's Graduate School of Business was introduced in the autumn of 1974. Within a short time there were rules, procedures, programs, for either dual degree or "minors" with the Division of Urban Planning in the School of Architecture, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the School of Public Health (1979-80), Union Theological Seminary (1981-1982), and School of International and Public Affairs (policy analysis), Special Education program at Bank Street College (1982-1984) and the School of Law (1987-89). These arrangements, although developed de novo, recall the tradition of the first decade with Columbia University and the programs of the 1920s with Yale Divinity, N.Y.U. School of Education, and the Training School for Jewish Social Work.

In all these matters, as in the expansion of the behavioral and social science framework employed at the School, there was much play for faculty, administration, student, and alumni discussion and initiative. Very little stood still. Yet one also could discern a new note: while the School always had taken seriously and prepared appropriately for periodic reaccredation from the Council on Social Work Education or its predecessor, there had never been any doubt about initiatives and program variations "not yet" visible elsewhere. The School was one of a group of leading schools at the cutting edge. It was followed, seldom led. However, action by the NASW in the late 1970s to accept graduates with undergraduate degrees as full members and the subsequent decision of CSWE to admit and accredit undergraduate social work programs - all in the context of a voluntary "affirmative action" initiative in the early 70s - led to a major power shift in CSWE. Soon there were many more undergraduates than graduate members and the by-laws and accreditation standards and procedures reflected concern with the undergraduate schools' definition of their missions and their preferred mandates for the graduate curriculum. I offer this too brief and obviously debatable characterization of the process only as a personal explanation of the fact that CSWE has also become an inhibitant and has, for the first time in this long history, imposed curriculum requirements on a School which by virtue of its leadership was always ipso facto in compliance. Other leading graduate schools have also shared this experience but the graduate deans' group cannot respond adequately since too many of them also operate undergraduate programs.


The Reagan-Bush Years

As already suggested, many of the research and curriculum developments of the 70s continued into the 1980s and indeed into the 1990s. But now there were new problems and challenges for social work and social welfare as American society faced its first systematic effort to dismantle or cut back some of the social programs of the Great Society and the New Deal. Following passage of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 (OBRA, 1981) social workers had reasons for concern about the well-being of clients dependent on public assistance programs (especially AFDC, food stamps, and child nutrition), and social welfare agencies needed to master what came to be known as "cut-back" management.

Little was or could be done to stop OBRA 81, given the political dynamics of the time, but CUSSW was one of several social work schools at which some faculty teams undertook research to learn what the changes in AFDC eligibility rules about work and the major decrease in AFDC work incentives did to clients. Subsequent reports from these studies heightened public concern and may have contributed to the series of minor adjustments legislated in the several subsequent years. No large attacks on social programs succeeded in Washington after the 1982 election, but there was need for constant vigilance. Moreover, it soon became clear that a Congress constrained in social expenditures could not nonetheless ignore the public concern with child neglect and abuse, runaways, drugs, HIV/AIDS, domestic violence, homelessness, the needs of frail elderly. Bipartisan Congressional action went where the President did not lead and a large number of relatively small categorical service programs were enacted.

In all of this, the CUSSW Dean, Mitchell Ginsberg, in a major leadership role in several national social work associations and several CUSSW faculty members were active in various advocacy capacities, in Congressional testimony, and in contributing to program development. The CUSSW presence was visible in the long campaign for child care legislation that came to fruition in the early '90s and in the truncated parental leave legislation twice vetoed by President Bush and finally signed by President Clinton.

Not an official activity of the School, but housed here and directed by Professor Richard Cloward, the organization HumServ (in a sense a derivation from MFY but pursuing a new policy tack) conducted a voter registration campaign in the 80s, calling on voters to protect their social entitlements. Later, the motor-voter tactic was adopted, an effort to let people register to vote as they went to public offices to do other business (renew licenses, apply for public assistance). The federal legislation was finally passed during the Clinton presidency. Significant numbers of new voters have been registered: the impact on actual voting or on patterns of voting will now be observed.

The Adoption Assistance Act of 1980, passed at the end of the Carter years, gave legal status and resources for the "permanency" commitment in child welfare. Several of the studies which had come out of the CUSSW child welfare research were cited in the Hearings and advocacy materials. This legislation was protected against an effort to "block grant" it in 1981 but it was underfunded and not adequately implemented by a constrained bureaucracy. In New York, a strong CUSSW child welfare faculty in various consultation, advocacy, and training roles helped public and private child welfare agencies move in the directions called for by the federal law and earlier state legislation.

None of this is intended to exaggerate: the major social legislation of the era was fought over and shaped by interest groups, lobbyists, and officials - with a not-very-influential presence of social work associations, and CUSSW was essentially observer, analyst, instructor. I refer to the social security reforms of 1983, the tax reforms of 1986, the McKinney Homeless Act of 1987, and even the Family Support Act of 1988 and - during the Bush years - the Americans With Disability legislation and the improved housing funding.

But within the M.S. and doctoral programs the policy developments were followed, analyzed and taught. Further, the field of practice foundation courses and new specialized electives integrated the new programs and information into practice as taught. The practice concentrations, as revised in the '70s, were made more realistic with experience and were described by the early '80 as: clinical social work practice; practice, programming and supervision; social administration; social research. Students from all concentrations share the two first direct-practice courses and are required to complete (single) courses in research, personality development, social science, social policy, and in a field of practice. All else is elective.

In the mid-80s, the School established an educational site at SUNY/Purchase to provide improved access for courses and field work to students who reside north of the City in Westchester and Rockland counties and in Connecticut. The program has attracted highly qualified applicants and has been very popular. Also, in the late 80s, the School increased its flexibility and competitiveness by offering applicants an opportunity to complete degree requirements in a combined full-time and part-time program over three or four years.

The pattern of research and demonstration activities, several very productive of research and with obvious impact nationally and internationally, continued. A 1984-87 listing included: the Brookdale Institute of Aging and Human Development; Columbia Community Services (a homelessness project); Cross-National Studies Research program; Industrial Social Welfare Center; Child Welfare Training Project; Cognitive Behavioral Interventions for Child-Abusing Parents; Maternal and Child Health Training Project; Westchester Department of Social Services Training Project. Beyond this, a large number of faculty members were involved in research related to their special competence - so that faculty names appeared regularly in the field's journals. The range of personality theories, social science orientations and practice expertise in the faculty had continued to expand in the 80s and with the arrival of Professors Steven Schinke and Robert E. Schilling in the late 80s, the School was the site of large behavioral studies. At the same time practice texts reflecting older and newer pschodynamic and "person-in-situation" traditions continued to appear and to have wide influence.

Before the review of the Clinton years and the concluding notes, the reader may find the perspective offered by numbers and lists helpful. We refer to Appendix C.


The Clinton Years

Much of the 90s, after the Bush administration, has been continuous with the 80s, from the point of view of training for practice and research and demonstration, but one or two highlights are especially relevant.

The School had never had a fully endowed chair. Efforts to create chairs in honor of some of the faculty giants in the past, Eduard Lindeman, Gordon Hamilton, Eveline Burns, had not been successful. The money raised was well used, but for other purposes. A chair in honor of Marion Kenworthy was only partly funded - until the 90s. A Brookdale chair in gerontology was financed for a limited time, not endowed. Then came the present dean: researcher, educator, social work leader, and (apparently even to his own surprise) expert fund raiser. We now have 10 endowed chairs, making a major contribution to the budget, faculty stability, and the substantive mission of the School. (Is a new building far behind?) Endowed scholarships, tight budget discipline, successful alumni annual campaigns have added up to create an endowment of approximately $50 million (a five-fold increase in 13 years) and a budget in the black, a comfortable situation for budgetary relations with the University.

A word about student and faculty diversity. CUSSW has had a strong record in African-American and Puerto Rican student recruitment and a productive project for cooperation with historically black colleges since the commitments of 1968. Increasingly, however, the patterns of immigration and international recruitment have shifted in the direction of Asians and other Hispanics as well (foreign students, native born, new immigrants). The School educates a very diverse student body (now almost 35 percent "minority"), and the faculty is itself far more diverse than its predecessors. In the 60s and 70s the emphasis was on African-Americans and Puerto Ricans. In the early 90s, the minority faculty are far more diverse. I reviewed this past year's summer faculty and doctoral degree recipients and could only marvel at how "normal" developments have implemented the "diversity" theme of the past decade in our professional culture. Look at the lists!

One result of all this has been some addition to the field of practice options in the M.S. program. In the current catalogue the list includes all those covered previously (with "Disabilities" added to Health and Mental Health), but also Contemporary Social Problems (homelessness, violence, and substance abuse) and International Social Welfare (including services to immigrants and refugees). School social work, which has come and gone in the past, has been reestablished.

Retirements and deaths have resulted in major faculty turnover from the mid-1980s, as the post-World War II faculty generation has gradually receded in size and a new, younger generation of faculty members has taken over their many roles and now are in the majority. Whether one judges by formal credentials or student-assessed classroom performance, by practice initiatives and innovation or published research, the "newcomers" are outstanding. The hundred-year tradition is in good hands. One is impressed with the richness, among other things, of practice elective course offerings. Where once the School was "diagnostic", in the Freudian tradition, courses now cover a diversity of practice models: psychosocial, cognitive-behavioral, life-model, task-centered, crisis intervention, and problem-solving.

At the end of the 1980s, a Center for the Study of Social Work Practice was established and endowed at the School as a joint activity with the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services, a high-quality multi-faceted clinical setting which has long been a center for training and collaboration with the School. The founding director was Professor Shirley Jenkins who was succeeded after her death by Professor Edward J. Mullen. The Center in the tradition of clinical and case work research facilitates research collaboration by academics and practitioners, sponsors strategic national conferences, funds pilot research initiatives, conduct research, and publishes reports and newsletters.

Illustrative of the practice and practice-research diversity at the School is the work of the Robert Schilling-Nabila El-Bassel Social Intervention Group (SIG), a team of 50 funded by large federal research initiatives which has the goal of "inventing interventions" to cope with the most difficult of social problems and, ultimately, to test such interventions through clinical trials. It undertakes to work with people not in formal agency settings. The research plans call for a series of well-ordered steps, each with rigorous requirements and building on what goes before. The work is multi-disiplinary in conceptualization and implementation and like most other of the many faculty-directed studies at the School offers the opportunity for practitioners, as well as assistantships and jobs for doctoral students.

The pioneers of 1898, or 1904, or 1911 (perhaps even 1950!) would not have conceived of a school in which faculty members in all specialities have doctorates and carry out research. They worked with a few research "specialists". This pattern began to change in the 1950s. In the last dozen years, funded research at the School has increased ten-fold over what was already a good base. What was in 1898 a School to teach the "practical" has also over the hundred years become a center that values and teaches scholarship while constantly improving the teaching of practice theory and how to practice. Ranking systems for schools are controversial, but if one attends not to the suspect "reputational" measures and looks at the objective ones (faculty citations in the indexes, per capita faculty publications in leading journals, doctoral graduates and their publications), CUSSW has been first over the last four years in all but one ranking, where it was second (and where a case can be made that that too should be read as a first).

When the Republican party took control of the Congress in 1994 and proposed to implement their "Contract with America", to which a large number of their members in the House of Representative were committed, it generated protests, letters, testimony and other expressions of sentiment. A faculty-student coalition at Columbia was active and instigated action elsewhere. Faculty members played important roles in various conferences and meetings. A letter from three professor at CUSSW was read by a new York Senator during the debate. None of this stopped the basic "welfare reform" legislation, as revised to avoid a presidential veto, but it was part of a national reaction that for the time stopped a series of related initiatives. The social policy faculty had been strongly augmented in recent years by replacements for retired and deceased members as part of a general succession process at the School in the 90s - and almost all were or soon became engaged in research on the impacts of the legislative and budgetary actions, spillover effects, child welfare spillovers, and work-family issues.

In the meantime the Cross-National Studies program received major funding from two foundations for an effort developed under the title "Confronting the Politics of Child and Family Policy". One component involved six expert consultation/mini-conferences over an 18 month period to clarify options for states and the major national voluntary organization in dealing with the results of P.L. 104-193. Six reports out of the work had wide national circulation. The other component was a multi-city roundtable with 30-35 members that over a two-year period clarified issues created for the big cities, conducted six big-city case studies, and developed the content for a widely disseminated volume, Big Cities in the Welfare Transition.

In another initiative, two members of the social policy faculty completed a simulation study, the potential impact of the federal legislation in New York, and circulated it - to wide publicity - at a time when it could influence the New York State plan.

None of this is mentioned to exaggerate impacts, most of which are unknown, but it does illustrate the relatedness of faculty research and teaching to the shifting social welfare scene and the continuity of a tradition that developed in the School's first decade: one cannot work with a child, family, or group without constant awareness of setting, resources, availability of services and without a willingness to strive to be sure that they are in place.

It is not that the entire agenda always has attention. Much of the faculty research involves "basic" knowledge development with a strong social science component: some is policy related and directly "applied". Since the Reagan administration there have been devolution initiatives (the new or the newest federalism) as well as encouragement to privatization. The legislation of the Clinton years offers more opportunities to the "for profit" sector. Managed care is being explored and experimented with in child welfare. There are varied interests within the profession (NASW is expected to protect its members who wish to be properly treated as providers by Managed Care companies), in the local social service communities (non-profit agencies require public funding of the bulk of their budgets), in some fields (the desire to encourage employer or union employee assistance programs or day care). These are all visible topics; some appear on CUSSW research and action agendas. The private practice debate of the 60s has not had a full CUSSW response - but clearly a larger framework will be needed - or at the least some faculty members will need to develop analysis, debate, and thus encourage student understanding.

It will be recalled that the School has had a relationship with Columbia University from the beginning. Columbia faculty were among the early lecturers in the Summer School of 1898-1904 and the one year courses of 1904-1911. Two of the early directors, Devine and Lindsay had Columbia appointments. There were reciprocal arrangements for course attendance for Columbia and social work students. In the 1920s some social work courses were credited for a Columbia M.S. But it was in 1940 with the academic affiliation that the current era began. In 1950 the School was separated from CSS and obtained a State charter (1951). It joined the Columbia Corporation in 1959 and moved to the campus in 1970.

We have already discussed the importance of the doctoral program in facilitating fuller integration of the School with the University. As much should be said about participation from the 1950s, first in the University Council and then the Senate - and the involvement of faculty members and administration in task forces, committees and projects, ranging from the publications committee of Columbia University Press, to the Human Subjects Review Committee, to the boards of the Bureau of Applied Social Research and its successor Social Science Center. Faculty members participate in the rich program of University Seminars - and involve members of other faculties in seminars generated by our projects. Our Ph.D. students are active with and eligible for fellowships from an inter-departmental Social Policy Consortium which we helped create. Our faculty members lecture in courses in other schools and departments and sometimes co-teach. The decision to award social work Ph.Ds by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences involves joint appointments for a significant number of social work faculty in that School. A new Institute, with the School in a central role, will this coming fall join many departments and university units in research, seminars, and joint educational efforts focused on young children and their families.

With all this has come accountability to Columbia standards and policies and - most important for faculty - integration into the University's procedures for the granting of tenure. In effect, the University's criteria and priorities with regard to research, teaching, professional and school - community service become the School's criteria too, unless variations can be negotiated. The rules and procedures have become increasingly important and have caused some tension and stress since University policy has its own dynamic and the School is but one unit. It is unnecessary to list the advantages of the School's affiliation with a great research university - but it also has a countable price. It is not the price that the School leadership worried about when it deferred university affiliation for more than four decades, however, for it has proven possible to balance the practical and the theoretical, the field work and the lecture; technical courses in social work methods have been developed to a level that commands respect. Access to behavioral and social science and professional courses in other faculties is extraordinarily enriching. There is no longer any question about affiliation - nor has there been for 50 years, but understanding the price is part of understanding the School today.

CONCLUSION


In short, it is a centennial story of consolidation and integration after broad and even diffuse roles at the beginning; of definition and redefinition of core-base and specialty as the experiences of the profession changed; and, then, with the watershed social policy developments of the Great Society, the many categorical - if fragmentary - initiatives vis à vis the social problems of the 1970s and 1980s, and the add-ons required by a changed accreditation process. If the long and complex lists of lectures and concerns of 1898 and 1904 seemed diffuse and - given what was to develop - occasionally misdirected, the Bulletin of 1997-98 also seems very complex, but not diffuse, offering increasingly specialized sequences (once again?) and very rich in the opportunities it offers individuals in the context of what has become a much more pluralistic occupation of direct services to individuals, programming and administration, and scholarly policy analysis. The distinctions between the "practical" and social science "theoretical" of the early decades do not apply to the faculty members in this professional school of the late 1990s. They practice and teach social work but are also sophisticated researchers, and behavioral-social scientists in the domains relevant to their concentrations.

"100" is an attractive, rounded number, but in the history of a live, vital institution with an urgent mission and a record of leadership it signifies only a milestone for what I have called "celebration and contemplation". Indeed we are early in a new era which may be summed up with the terms "economic globalization" and "the information revolution". Already underway internationally is a reexamination of social protection and social benefit systems and an updating of the personal social services. There is work to be done by social workers in all this. Fortunately there are faculty members and researchers here at CUSSW who understand this and are prepared to act - and able students who are interested.

The agenda must also include issues about privatization, of practice through public funding and/or market mechanisms, the future relationship with an also changing university, full integration of the faculty-student-client diversity trends into our program - and some societal threats to the values that have represented a constant throughout our history. These matters I leave for the discussions of the next two days. For the moment I only add, "Happy Centennial, CUSSW. Be well".


REFERENCES

American Association of Social Workers (AASW). 1929. Social Case Work, Generic and Specific. (New York).
Austin, David M. 1986. A History of Social Work Education. (Austin, Texas: School of Social Work).
Bartlett, Harriett M. 1970. The Common Base of Social Work Practice. (New York: National Association of Social Workers).
Berengarten, Sidney, ed. 1967-69. "Report of the Acting-Dean". (New York: Columbia University School of Social Work).
Berengarten, Sidney, ed. 1987. "The Columbia University School of Social Work: A History of Social Pioneering", Mongraph I. (New York: Columbia University School of Social Work).
Berengarten, Sidney, ed. 1992. "The Columbia University School of Social Work: A History of Social Pioneering", Monograph IV. (New York: Columbia University School of Social Work).
Berengarten, Sidney, ed. 1993. "The Columbia University School of Social Work: A History of Social Pioneering", Monograph VII. (New York: Columbia University School of Social Work).
Bernstein, Saul and others. 1942. The New York School of Social Work. (New York: Community Service Society).
Broadhurst, Betty Page. 1971. Social Thought, Social Practice and Social Work Education: Sanborn, Ely, Warner, Richmond. Unpublished DSW dissertation. (New York: Columbia University School of Social Work).
Chambers, Clark. 1963. Seedtime of Reform. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Devine, Edward. 1901. The Practice of Charity. (New York: Lentilhon and Co.).
Devine, Edward. 1910. Social Forces. (New York: Charities Publication Committee). Various dated essays from the editor's page of The Survey.
Devine, Edward. 1911. The Spirit of Social Work. (New York: Charities Publication Committee).
Devine, Edward. 1916. Pauperism: An Analysis. A document in the series, Studies in Social Work. (New York School of Philanthropy).
Fisher, Jacob. 1936. The Rank and File Movement in Social Work, 1931-1936. (New York: New York School of Social Work).
Gessner, Robert, ed. 1936. The Democratic Man: Selected Writings of Eduard C. Lindeman. (Boston: Beacon Press).
Gilman, D.C. 1906. The Launching of a University. (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company).
Hamilton, Gordon. 1940. Theory and Practice of Social Case Work. (New York: Columbia University Press).
Hofstadter, Richard. 1955. The Age of Reform. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf).
Hollis, Ernest V. and Alice J. Taylor. 1951. Social Work Education in the United States. (New York: Columbia University Press).
Johnson, Alexander, ed. 1905. Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, 1905. (Columbus, Ohio: Fred J. Heer Press).
Kahn, Alfred J. 1960. "Social Sciences and the Conceptual Framework for Community Organization Practice", in Leonard J. Kogan, ed., Social Science Theory and Social Work Research. (New York: National Association of Social Workers).
Kahn, Alfred J. 1965. "Social Work Fields of Practice" in The Encyclopedia of Social Work, 1965. (New York: National Assocation of Social Workers), pp. 750-755.
Kamerman, Sheila B. 1995. "Fields of Practice" in Carol Meyer and Mark Mattaini, eds., Foundations of Social Work Practice (Washington, D.C.: National Association of Social Workers).
Kenworthy, Marion E., MD and Porter R. Lee. 1929. Mental Hygiene and Social Work. (New York: The Commonwealth Fund).
Klein, Philip. 1932. Some Basic Statistics in Social Work. (New York: Columbia University Press).
Klein, Philip. 1938. A Social Study of Pittsburgh. (New York: Columbia University Press).
Lee, Porter R. 1937. Social Work as Cause and Function and Other Papers. (New York: Columbia University Press).
Lee, Porter R. and Edward Devine. 1915. #1, "Social Work with Families and Individuals" (Lee) and #2, "Organized Charity and Industry" (Devine). (New York: New York School of Philanthropy).
Leiby, James. 1978. A History of Social Welfare and Social Work in the United States. (New York: Columbia University Press).
Lindeman, Eduard. 1921. The Community: An Introduction to the Study of Community Leadership and Organization. (New York: Association Press).
Lowery, Lawson G. and Geddes Smith. 1933. The Institute for Child Guidance, 1927-1933. (New York: The Commonwealth Fund).
Lubove, Roy. 1965. The Professional Altruist. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).
Maas, Henry S., ed. 1951. Adventure in Mental Health: Psychiatric Social Work with the Armed Forces in World War II. (New York: Columbia University Press).
Meier, Elizabeth G. 1954. A History of the New York School of Social Work. (New York: Columbia University Press).
Merton, Robert. 1957. Social Theory and Social Structure. (New York: The Free Press).
Richmond, Mary. 1917. Social Diagnosis. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation).
Richmond, Mary. 1922. What is Social Case Work? (New York: Russell Sage Foundation).
Russell, James E. 1955. National Policies for Education, Health, and Social Services. (New York Doubleday and Company). Part Four, "Social Services and the Free Economy". Part Five, "Income Security for a Free People").
Simon, Barbara Levy. 1994. The Empowerment Tradition in American Social Work. (New York: Columbia University Press). Ch. IV, pp. 60-71.
Stein, Herman D. 1960. Curriculum Study. (New York: Columbia University School of Social Work).
Warner, Amos. 1894. American Charities. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Co.).
Wickenden, Elizabeth and Winifred Bell. 1966. Public Welfare: Time for a Change. (New York: New York School of Social Work of Columbia University).
Wright, Helen. 1954a. "Three Against Time", Social Service Review. (March), p. 49.
Wright, Helen. 1954b. "Social Work Education: Problems for the Future", New Directions in Social Work, Cora Kasius, ed. (New York: Harper and Bros.), pp. 181-182.
United Nations (U.N.) Dpeartment of Economic and Social Affairs. 1958. Training for Social Work: Third International Survey. (New York).

APPENDICES



A. E. Meier's Chronology
B. The Third Summer's Program
C. Numbers, Gender, and Background Information
Table I. Enrolled Students, 1898-1941.
Table II. Graduates, 1905-1940.
Table III. Graduates, 1983-1997.
Figure: Applications and Enrollments, 1976-1989.

[*]

Professor Emeritus, Columbia University School of Social Work. Prepared for presentation at Plenary Session I, Centennial Celebration, June 12, 1998.

[1] According to Broadhurst (1971), at the 1895 meeting of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections there was "recognition of the need to bring theory and practice together in the teaching of scientific charity" (p. 762). F.H. Giddings of Columbia was present as were participants from Harvard, Yale, Chicago Theological. There were papers sent from Smith and Wisconsin. Ayres, who arrived in Chicago in 1895 set up a plan with Henderson, J. Lathrop and G. Taylor for practical work experience for students from various universities near Chicago for the summer of 1896. There were six participants (two from Northwestern, two from Chicago, one from Michigan, and one from Wisconsin; (p. 771). That fall the University of Chicago offered two extension courses in sociology "for the special benefit of those engaged in charity work" (principles of poor relief and problems of the poor in cities). Ayres, one of the two lecturers, responding to a board split and dissatisfaction resigned and came to New York COS as "favorable to a summer class." The focal point for education in social work shifted to Columbia and COS, but Chicago "was not far behind" (p. 785). As typical of the two-track development, Wisconsin eventually developed strong departments of economics and sociology while New York and Chicago developed schools for training social workers.

[2] Other major centers of influence were Pennsylvania's Wharton School (see below re: Simon N. Patten) and Harvard's Department of Social Ethics (Francis Peabody).

[3] It is of some interest that as of late 1997 the New York Times reported that "more than 75 American graduate schools now offer advanced degrees in philanthropy", apparently concentrating on management of or fundraising for non-profit organizations - or preparation for board membership. There is a large Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University - Purdue University and a specialized library. The New York Times, Dec. 24, 1997, p. A15. Unlike the philanthropy education that evolved into social work early in the twentieth century, many of these programs are business school-based and think of themselves as focused on management, although some have broader ambitions. In addition, several centers [Rockefeller Foundation, Philanthropic Initiative (Boston), The Council on Foundations] conduct brief intensive training courses for foundation board members and staffs. The New York Times, May 3, 1991, p. A1. The initial Summer School in Philanthropy of 1898 attracted people with all these interests and much more.

[4] Hofstadter, writing when he did, referred to Populism, Progressivism and the New Deal. In current perspective, one can view the Welfare State as in fact successively shaped by the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society

[5] A review of Devine's substantial writings and those of Porter Lee, who followed upsets all sterotypes about COS leadership in the Progressive Era and Social Darwinism. This essay allows no space for such a review. Devine pointed out in his "Organized Charity and Industry" in Studies of Social Work #1 (1915) that the Pittsburgh Survey and subsequent reporting in the Survey magazine pulled no punches in "giving continuous and searching attention to industry" despite the importance of J.P. Morgan as COS treasurer and J.D. Rockefeller and A. Carnegie as major contributors.