INTRODUCTION

UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare is widely recognized as one of the premier institutions in the nation for the training of social workers. It is known for its commitment to justice, its rigorous academic standards, and its role in preparing future social workers to meet society’s most urgent needs. Recent decisions by the administration, however, threaten to undermine this reputation and betray the values the School publicly upholds.

In May 2025, two beloved and highly respected social work practitioners and alum —Claudette Mestayer and Robert Watts—were laid off without warning, despite their deep contributions to the MSW program, their mentorship of hundreds of students, and their embodiment of the very values the School purports to champion: dignity, justice, humility, and service.

These layoffs are not isolated incidents. They reflect a broader trend within the School of Social Welfare—a devaluation of practitioners, a turn toward theoretical instruction divorced from the lived realities of the field, and a departure from community-embedded education.

THE PROBLEM

Today, only three practice-based social workers remain with active roles in supporting MSW students at UC Berkeley. One has a full appointment, one was recently hired as practicum director and another, eveline Chang, is precariously under employed via a reduced contract. Claudette and Robert—have been let go. The department, which once proudly relied on seasoned practitioners and community lecturers, is rapidly losing its grounding in real-world social work practice.

This is not solely a budgetary decision. It represents a systemic shift—an internal restructuring that dismisses the labor of practicum-based social workers and severs students from critical sources of mentorship, guidance, and inspiration. The budgetary “crisis” appears to be manufactured as the school, for the 2025/2026 academic year, declined to apply for workforce development grants like Title IVE, the grant that provides stipends and trainings to students who want to work in public child welfare, and Public Behavioral Health, a grant to recruit more social workers providing clinical services in mental health settings after graduation. These grants could have funded significant portions of the practicum consultant positions that were cut.

Many of the social workers pushed out were bilingual, bicultural, and deeply connected to Bay Area communities. They helped students make meaning of their work during times of political upheaval, racial violence, and legal uncertainty. They modeled trauma-informed care, radical inclusion, and cultural humility—not from a textbook, but from experience.

THE IMPACT ON STUDENTS AND COMMUNITY

Social work is not merely a discipline—it is a profession, an ethos, and a practice that must be modeled, not just taught. The absence of clinicians like Claudette and Robert harms:

• Students, who lose access to culturally responsive, field-informed mentors during some of the most emotionally intense years of their education.
  

• Community partners, who depend on well-prepared MSW interns and who have built long-standing relationships with these now-laid-off faculty.
  

• BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and immigrant students, who saw themselves reflected in instructors who understood firsthand the realities of marginalization and resistance.
  

• The profession, which depends on institutions like Berkeley to train social workers who can lead, not just theorize.
  

The School is drifting toward an academic model untethered from practice, replacing social workers with non-practicing faculty and undermining the very foundation of practicum education. Without practitioner educators, the MSW program risks becoming a theoretical exercise, ill-equipped to prepare students for the challenges of direct practice.

WE DEMAND:

1. Reinstate social work practitioners—starting with Claudette Mestayer and Robert Watts. These educators represent the heart of the program, and their loss is a direct blow to its mission and integrity.
   

2. Ensure stable, equitable contracts for practicing social workers who teach and supervise. The School must invest in faculty who model clinical, ethical, and community-based practice.
   

3. Restore transparency and shared governance in staffing and budget decisions. Students, community partners, and faculty deserve to know how and why key decisions are made.
   

4. Center practice in social work education. Future social workers must learn from those actively engaged in the profession—not just in theory, but in schools, hospitals, clinics, and community centers.

5. Provide in-person practicum seminars so students can share about their internship experiences and get advice from the practica faculty leading the seminar and from their peers. The new workload formula the school provided to the union in June indicates seminars will be asynchronous and provided via modules. This will undermine the clinical training MSW students need.

FINAL THOUGHTS

In her commencement remarks, Interim Dean Susan Stone said: “Now more than ever, social workers are needed in the world.” We agree. But we cannot train the next generation of social workers while pushing the current ones out. We cannot claim to prepare students for clinical and community work while gutting the very infrastructure that makes such preparation possible.

Claudette Mestayer, Robert Watts, and Christina Feliciana worked in the 24/25 school year without a practicum director after November 1st. We supported each other as we tried to make sense of the impact of the Executive Orders on how services could be delivered to the most vulnerable members of our society. We heard from students who were terrified their reproductive justice health clinic could be bombed or staff shot with impunity after Trump pardoned criminals who had committed those crimes. We listened as students told us through tears that they had no resources to offer young people at risk of being deported to a “home” country they have no memory of, while consulting with immigration attorneys and agency supervisors who were thinking about ways to smuggle the young people to Canada. We held space for BIPOC students crestfallen that a job serving veterans in this country might mean they have to deny their identity as persons of color and/or their LGBTQI+ identity. Our seminars helped to hold students together as they listened to their peers and tried to find hope as they entered the social work profession at such an uncertain time. Our work involves a lot of “unseen labor” and we had no practicum director to communicate to the Senate faculty or the larger community about what we had managed to accomplish and to survive this past year.

This is a moment of moral reckoning for the School of Social Welfare. Will it live up to its mission? Or will it continue down a path that silences practitioners, betrays students, and fractures trust with the communities it claims to serve?

We, the undersigned, call on UC Berkeley leadership to reverse these harmful decisions, reinvest in practitioner-led education, and honor the essential contributions of social workers—starting within its own institution.

Respectfully,

[Add your signature to this letter; if signing on behalf of an organization, please note this in the "comment" box.]

Update: We have over 1,000 signatures! Join them, and see our list of signatories here.