“Problem Students in Early Professional Social Work: Disability, Race, and Discipline at the New York School of Social Work, 1915-1920”

Ari Forsyth, University of Washington

On October 2, 1920, field work supervisors at the New York School of Social Work (NYSSW), the nation’s most important institute for training professional social workers, met to launch what they called a “new field experiment.” At their first meeting, supervisors coordinated new, experimental methods for surveilling and obsessively documenting student-workers in the field. At their second meeting, supervisors’ discussion narrowed to a single topic: “difficult students” (“and the problems they presented.”) In the eyes of NYSSW field supervisors, “difficult students'' ranged from students they deemed too “markedly foreign” for professional responsibility to students whose “excessive shyness and a lack of sparkle” were deemed “strong personality handicaps.” Taken together, the case files on problem students reveal not only the discriminatory logic of self-conscious professionalization, but the experiences of diverse students drawn to the profession. This paper argues that supervisors drew on historically overlapping constellations of race-ethnicity, sex-gender, and (dis)ability, and created new subordinated categories of humanity as they produced and policed the boundaries of who could or could not be a future social worker. Speculations about student-workers’ capacities devalued racialized and working-class students and cohered into talk that had actual value: annotations on field work. rosters, routine memos between staff, and “informal minutes” of supervisor’s meetings. As they acted on students with disciplinary force, supervisor’s actions also constructed and invisibilized an archive of problem students. Invisible, because an emerging discourse of disability allowed this prejudice to float freely and to serve as an oppositional category against which the new figure of the professional social worker could be defined. This paper draws from this archive to tell the history of professional social work through the lens of the field’s “difficult students,” recovering a lost history of struggle between supervisors and student-workers at the NYSSW from 1915-1920.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 4. Academic and Professional Career Trajectories: Meritocratic Dreams and Stratified Realities