10:08 AM EST on Wednesday, February 9, 2005

THE EXTENT to which various paradigms of benefit provision lead toward independence is the fundamental measure of welfare's effectiveness, according to both social workers and "wascally Wepublicans." As would be expected, the greatest debate in substantive welfare reform is how to characterize the results of different approaches.

In Rhode Island, such debate is expected to take place at the School of Social Work at Rhode Island College. But recent public scrutiny indicates that the school views itself as an advocate for a single outlook, rather than as an academic institution considering, with openness, the merits of diverse methods.

The School of Social Work -- joined at the hip to RIC's Poverty Institute -- operates on the premise that government benefits confer personal dignity, especially as opposed to dogged self-reliance or private charity.

The school's charter appears to suggest that it is a failing of the rest of society that folks lie in mean estate, and thus the responsibility of society to provide for them in a nonjudgmental way. It teaches that a panoply of benefits are virtual rights for potential recipients. If any of the assistance available under the ironic rubric of promoting family "independence" is not used, the program is condemned as inflexible.

Thus, the latest marching orders for School of Social Work students is to lobby, as part of a required course, for extending educational benefits to those on welfare beyond the first two years of eligibility. The reasoning behind extending benefits is that a new mother either has little choice about spending these early years with her child or might prefer to do so.

But not everyone agrees. Bill Felkner, a master's candidate in social work at RIC, has armed himself with reams of research that suggest that work experience, coordinated with brief particularized training, far outperforms Rhode Island's idea that every unwed mother should go to junior college. He proposes instead to lobby for tightening eligibility requirements for the education benefit, and tying it to efforts at work experience.

This silly idealist has the nerve to expect a master's program in social work to live up to the profession's own standard of respecting the opinions of peers, regardless of their political ideology (National Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics, 2.01).

But the notion that there might be other reasonable ideas besides increased government redistribution for allowing human dignity to flourish across the economic spectrum is simply not on their plate at RIC. So Mr. Felkner is told by professors that his views are incompatible with the vocation, and if he doesn't toe the party line, his academic career is over.

What a great irony that a father of two who is simultaneously working his way through school, practicing what he preaches, is shunned for raising the level of debate on this subject in his courses. The academic circling of wagons at RIC shows the danger to a free society when the conscience of individual professionals is superseded by those exercising a hegemony over relevant academic credentials.

Of course, Mr. Felkner is a bit of an anomaly -- perhaps more for his outspokenness than his ideas. There is little doubt that social work is largely peopled with individuals who treat Barbara Ehrenreich's anti-capitalist tract Nickel and Dimed as the revealed word. But the idea that this means you can't think otherwise and be a social worker is intellectually indefensible, as well as constitutionally questionable.

Once again, RIC is on the hot seat about whether its purpose is indoctrinating yet another generation of Rhode Island's social workers to perpetuate the very poverty it proposes to vanquish. Talk about job security.

Even at Brown University, that Ivy ivory tower of political correctness, students have seen fit to adopt an academic bill of rights intended to end the censorship of ideas on campus epitomized by efforts to prevent controversialist David Horowitz from speaking there. Brown students recognized what their faculty did not: that a refusal to permit certain ideas to be expressed based on presupposition about their merits is an embarrassment to the tradition of liberal education.

It is high time that students at state schools were offered the same opportunity to escape the dogma regularly preached in some disciplines. The lack of response to Mr. Felkner's reasonable entreaties to RIC faculty and administration, coupled with their chilling behavior, implying academic consequences for students' failure to espouse the requisite ideology, calls for serious oversight.

It is not the business of the state to tell private institutions what constitutes a proper academic environment, but these are state institutions. Thus, it is not only proper but paramount for the legislature to adopt a similar academic bill of rights for the state's university and its colleges, as these schools seem disinclined to confront their failings on their own. This is certainly social work for which Bill Felkner could lobby in good conscience.

Brian Bishop, a libertarian radio-talk-show host, is a member of the board of advisers for The Foundation for Intellectual Diversity, www.idiversity.org