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Abrams, 2 Emeriti Professors on List of Top 100 Social Work Scholars

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Three current and former UCLA Luskin professors are among the 100 most influential social work scholars, according to an updated ranking published in the journal Research on Social Work Practice. The list, based on citations in peer-reviewed journals that have been analyzed using several metrics, identifies “those individuals who have made substantial contributions to social work discourse over the course of their academic careers,” according to the study’s authors, David R. Hodge and Patricia R. Turner of Arizona State University. Laura Abrams, chair of UCLA Luskin Social Welfare, is ranked No. 30 on the global list of scholars. Abrams’ research focuses on improving the well-being of youth and adults with histories of incarceration. She is joined by Professors Emeriti Duncan Lindsey (No. 68), who taught at UCLA from 1996 to 2009, and the late Yeheskel “Zeke” Hasenfeld (No. 90), who taught from 1987 to 2014. “We are deeply honored by this recognition of UCLA scholars and change makers whose research and robust discourse have helped shape the field of social welfare,” said Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, interim dean of the Luskin School. Social work periodicals are “a crucial repository of the profession’s knowledge … [where] ideas are proposed, interrogated, tested and refined,” Hodge and Turner wrote. “In this update, we identify the top 100 scholars whose efforts across their careers have singled them out as leading contributors to the social work profession’s knowledge base.”

 

Ballot Measure to Change Mental Health in State Could Backfire, Cohen Says

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In a story about the potential impact of Proposition 1, UCLA Luskin’s David Cohen discussed the implications of an effort to reform California’s mental health system. The statewide ballot measure is backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom as a step in solving the state’s homelessness crisis. But opponents say it would siphon money away from preventative mental health to add psychiatric institutions and promote involuntary treatment. Researchers like Cohen see involuntary or coerced care as counterproductive. “Few who review the existing evidence conclude that on balance, involuntary treatment improves the lives of those who experience it,” said Cohen, a professor of social welfare and associate dean. People contending with mental health issues can be traumatized by enforced treatment. “Being deprived of freedom is maddening. Being robbed of credibility is humiliating.” Plus, studies show that suicidal people who are institutionalized may actually be at heightened risk of self-harm upon discharge.

Read the Guardian story

 

New Director of Field Education Is a Triple Bruin Susan Lares-Nakaoka is one of four faculty additions to UCLA Luskin Social Welfare this academic year

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By Stan Paul

Susan Lares-Nakaoka is no stranger to UCLA or UCLA Luskin.

The holder of multiple degrees from UCLA, including an MSW and a UP PhD, Lares-Nakaoka was hired to fill the key program position formerly held by Gerry Laviña, who recently retired after a long tenure as director of field education.

Lares-Nakaoka’s most recent teaching post was at Cal State Long Beach as an assistant professor. She is excited about her return to the Westwood campus. “It has been such a big part of my life,” she said.

Three other new Social Welfare faculty additions are Tatiana Londoño, an assistant professor, and Erin Nakamura, a member of the field faculty, both of whom started in the fall, and Bianca Wilson, who came aboard as an associate professor in January.

Like Lares-Nakaoka, Nakamura and Wilson have previous ties to UCLA. Nakamura is a 2012 graduate of Luskin’s MSW program, and Wilson had been working at UCLA’s Williams Institute. Londoño comes to UCLA Luskin from the University of Texas at Austin, where she recently completed her PhD in social work. She also holds an MSSW from UT.

These faculty additions “bring a wealth of knowledge and experience and will certainly be an asset to our department and a great resource for our students,” said Laura Abrams, professor and chair of UCLA Luskin Social Welfare.

Lares-Nakaoka, who also held acaemic posts at the University of Hawaii, Cal State Sacramento and Cal State Dominguez Hills, focuses her research and writing on the intersection of race and community development, critical race pedagogy, and Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. She is lead author on a forthcoming book, “Critical Race Theory in Social Work,” as well as editor of an upcoming special issue on race and social justice in the Journal of Community Practice. She is also co-founder and co-director of the Critical Race Scholars in Social Work (CRSSW) collective.

She said her experience as director of field education at Cal State Dominguez Hills, which was a pioneer in teaching social work from a critical race theory perspective, was foundational to her approach to social work pedagogy.

“My area of interest is in racial justice issues, so I’m interested in seeing ways in which we can make a bigger impact in the L.A. area in terms of what can social work look like that has this lens of racial justice and anti-racism.”

Lares-Nakaoka believes that UCLA is poised to be a leader in this area.

“In L.A., it’s so appropriate with our diversity and history, of both successes and failures, in areas of racial justice,” she said. “It’s just such an opportunity for me to be at UCLA, where the nation’s experts on critical race theory reside.”

Nakamura, a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW), is working as a field liaison in a position partly funded through a grant from the California Department of Health Care Access (HCAI) to expand social welfare education at UCLA.

“Through the HCAI grant, I will be working to increase access to culturally and linguistically relevant behavioral health services for children, adults, and families in un- and underserved communities,” she said.

Nakamura said she also will work to promote a diverse and competent workforce through MSW student recruitment, development of behavioral health internship sites, specialized clinical trainings, and coursework that emphasizes cultural humility and competence, as well as accessible mentorship and support to students as they work toward clinical licensure.

“I’ll be also working in the community with the different behavioral health agencies that we’re going to be partnering with, so kind of the perfect integration of this micro and macro social work practice that I love,” Nakamura said.

She has previous experience as a field instructor and in teaching roles at universities, including at UCLA. Nakamura is teaching behavioral health courses and also maintains a private practice.

Nakamura described her return to campus as an amazing experience.

“I look forward to taking on this new role because the people who I sought out as field faculty when I was a student — they shaped my entire career and my life,” she said. “It feels very full circle to be working alongside those same individuals.”

Londoño, who is originally from Colombia and was raised in Miami, focuses on the mental health and psychosocial well-being of Latine/x immigrant youth and their families.

Londoño is currently involved in several studies funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A research emphasis on migration includes looking at how immigrant youth and families navigate and adapt to the psychosocial consequences of migration and resettlement. She is particularly interested in how immigration enforcement and practices in the U.S. play a role in their well-being.

“Something that’s really central to my work is being community-based,” said Londoño, who has conducted needs assessment and evaluation research related to study participants. “So, I will definitely be reaching out to organizations here working with immigrant and Latinx communities and slowly building those relationships.”

Joining Nakamura, Lares-Nakaoka and Londoño in January is Wilson, who holds master’s and PhD degrees — with a minor in statistics, methods and measurement — in psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on system-involved LGBTQ+ youth, LGBTQ+ poverty and sexual health among queer women.

“I’m looking forward to continuing in an interdisciplinary department, but now with a broad range of research topics,” she said. “This can create opportunities for collaboration but also for learning about the many areas of work I don’t focus on.”

In addition to being the Rabbi Zacky Senior Scholar of Public Policy at UCLA’s Williams Institute, as well as a researcher and senior scholar of public policy since 2011, Wilson has been a faculty affiliate at the UCLA California Center for Population Research since 2014. At UCLA Luskin, Wilson will focus on Social Welfare’s concentration in health and mental health across the life span, teaching courses in research, policy and human behavior.

Wilson said she also is excited to be working with students again.

“I look forward to working with them on their graduate work as well as students at all levels in the classrooms,” she said.

The new faculty hires in Social Welfare are enhancing both education and the School’s research portfolio in interesting areas of study and practice, Abrams said. “All of those topics are really speaking to what our students are interested in and what the community is asking for, so it’s an exciting time.”

For Lares-Nakaoka, a focus on ethnic-based community development corporations dates from her time as a doctoral student at UCLA Luskin.

“L.A. also has this very rich history of ethnic-based organizations,” she said, noting her ongoing involvement with organizations like the Little Tokyo Service Center that started with an MSW internship.

“There’s these amazing organizations with a rich social justice history from the 1970s and ’80s. I feel if we can work together to cultivate a type of social work that learns from them, we can ensure racial justice is a central part of social work practice.”

Lares-Nakaoka spent more than a dozen years working in social services and program development benefiting low-income residents.

She attended public schools in her hometown of Montebello, then pursued an undergraduate education at UCLA in history and sociology, graduating in 1991.

Lares-Nakaoka is looking forward to the opportunity to mentor current students. They are an impressive group, she said.

“UCLA students — they’re future leaders. It’s amazing some of the things they’ve already done,” she said. “They can articulate the plans they have for the future. You know they are going to go on and make a difference.”

UCLA feels like home, she said. “We’re very much a UCLA family. My whole family bleeds blue and gold.”

Abrams Co-Edits Book on Social Work’s Reckoning With a Racist History

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A new book co-edited by Laura Abrams, chair of Social Welfare at UCLA Luskin, considers the complex history of social work in the United States, including ways the profession has perpetuated white supremacy even as it works toward an anti-racist future. “Social Work, White Supremacy, and Racial Justice: Reckoning With Our History, Interrogating Our Present, Reimagining Our Future” is a collection of 40 chapters reflecting diverse voices, theories and methods. Published by Oxford University Press, the book challenges readers to acknowledge the field’s history of exclusion, moral superiority and oppression, then work to upend the status quo. “For social work to have a serious and substantive role in contributing to an anti-racist future, we must first commit to ending the practices that maintain our racist present,” including complicity with systems of policing, incarceration and child services that disproportionately punish Black, Indigenous and Latinx families, the editors write. They add, “It is challenging to imagine a future without racism, and yet still, many of the authors of these chapters are thinking outside the box and are working to build such a future. Collectively, this volume provides a foundation for what can become our next steps — to consider ideas, voices and platforms for concrete action that exist outside of mainstream discourse.” The book grew out of a four-part virtual conference on racial justice during the 2020-21 academic year that was organized by the four co-editors: Abrams, Sandra Edmonds Crewe of Howard University, Alan Dettlaff of the University of Houston and James Herbert Williams of Arizona State University.

two men and two women with book

Book co-editors, from left, James Herbert Williams, Sandra Edmonds Crewe, Alan Dettlaff and Laura Abrams.

 

4 UCLA Alumni Inducted Into California Social Work Hall of Distinction

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Four members of the UCLA community were among five individuals inducted this fall into the California Social Work Hall of Distinction, which recognizes pioneers and innovators in the field of social welfare. Adjunct Professor Jorja Leap MSW ’80;  Joseph A. Nunn MSW ’70 PhD ’90, director emeritus of the UCLA Field Education Program; Siyon Rhee MSW ’81 PhD ’88; and Jacquelyn McCroskey DSW ’80 were honored at an Oct. 21 ceremony hosted by the California Social Welfare Archives (CSWA), which launched the Hall of Distinction in 2002. Leap, a triple Bruin who earned a BA in sociology and a PhD in psychological anthropology, was recognized for her advocacy work with gangs and community justice reform. The CSWA cited her “nontraditional teaching approach” that brings students out of the classroom and into the city environment. Nunn was recognized for pioneering a standardized practicum education in the field of social work and for his dedication to promoting diversity and inclusion at the university, state and national levels. In addition to serving in multiple leadership roles in social welfare education, Nunn is the namesake of UCLA’s Joseph A. Nunn Social Welfare Alumni of the Year Award. Professor Rhee is director of the School of Social Work at Cal State Los Angeles, where her research focuses on health, mental health, intimate partner violence and culturally sensitive social work practices with children of Asian immigrant families. Her advocacy has brought hundreds of diverse social workers into the child welfare workforce, and she has received numerous honors for excellence in teaching and outstanding achievements. McCroskey, professor emerita of child welfare at USC and co-director of the Children’s Data Network in Los Angeles, was recognized for her efforts to enhance child and family well-being through improving county and state government systems. This year’s fifth inductee is labor organizer Arturo Rodriguez.

 

Tapping Into the Inner Strength of Black Girls Empowering children instead of focusing on their struggles will lead to healthier choices, says Luskin Lecturer Ijeoma Opara

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By Mary Braswell

“People out there expect you to fail. Prove the haters wrong. You know I’m here for you always.”

These words from a father to his young daughter — consistently encouraging her to finish school, stay away from drugs and make a good name for herself — helped her rise above the damaging stereotypes she faced as a Black girl growing up in America.

The New Jersey teen’s story was one of many shared by Yale University scholar Ijeoma Opara, who came to UCLA on Oct. 19 to deliver her message that harnessing the inner strengths of children of color is not just possible but imperative.

Opara, the first UCLA Luskin Lecturer of the 2023-24 academic year, conducts research focused on the well-being of Black girls, who may face multiple layers of stress because of their race, gender, class and age.

The conversation between father and daughter emerged in a survey Opara led of 200 girls from around the country, most in their mid-teens. With surprising frankness, they spoke of how they view themselves in the world, and how they struggle to protect their health and mental health in the face of harmful stereotypes.

“They were very aware that they were not loved by society,” said Opara, who directs the Substance Abuse and Sexual Health Lab at Yale.

“They understood, too, that society always assumed they were doing something bad. … They’re internalizing all the things that adults are saying about them, all the images they’re seeing.”

Some of the girls wondered how they could possibly thrive in a world that assumed they were angry, aggressive, into drugs and alcohol, or sexually permissive.

‘It’s not about us saving these children, right? They don’t necessarily need to be saved. They need to be empowered.’  — Ijeoma Opara of Yale University

“We cannot keep looking at Black children as if they are criminals instead of harnessing their strengths,” Opara said.

“It’s not about us saving these children, right? They don’t necessarily need to be saved. They need to be empowered.”

Opara was moved to study the unique experience of Black girls in high-risk surroundings because, she says, “I was one of them.”

Growing up in a part of New Jersey where violence and drug use were common, she saw many friends choose unhealthy paths. Later, as a social worker in New York City helping youths caught up in the criminal justice system, she came face to face with Black girls who had simply given up hope.

But she wondered, “What about girls like me and the other girls that I run into who are thriving in these environments? Why aren’t we talking about them, learning from them?”

On her academic journey, as she earned a PhD as well as master’s degrees in social welfare and public health, Opara set out to connect with these girls. She wanted to hear what factors led to their strong self-esteem and how their experiences could help others.

The common denominators, her research has found, include a strong sense of ethnic pride, a community that has their back and the belief that they have some control over their destinies.

Among girls who demonstrate a high level of resilience and self-assurance, the public health ramifications are striking, she said, with many far better equipped to avoid substance abuse and sexually transmitted infections.

For those who’ve already fallen into dangerous behaviors, these strategies can still provide a lifeline. Opara shared the story of Sheila, who by age 15 had been involved with robberies, attempted murder and kidnapping. Sheila had spent time on Rikers Island.

“She had no hope in the future. She thought she would be dead by 19 years old,” said Opara, who was assigned to Sheila’s case when she was a social worker.

With Opara’s help, Sheila came to “feel heard, feel like a teenager, feel like a human” and eventually turned her life around. She is now attending graduate school and volunteering as a youth advocate for a substance use prevention program.

“Sheila is the reason that I do the work that I do,” Opara said.

In her current research, Opara’s top priority is elevating the voices of young people of color. She has opened up opportunities for Black girls by offering internships in her lab and hosting tours of Yale to show that higher education is within their reach.

Her signature Dreamer Girls Project is a “safe space for Black girls that infuses elements of ethnic identity, of empowerment, of pride, of sisterhood,” Opara said, and its youth advisory board, a small working group of budding researchers, helps shape and administer her studies.

During her visit to UCLA, Opara met one-on-one with UCLA Luskin doctoral students and appeared at a virtual meeting of the Los Angeles County Commission on HIV’s Black Caucus. The commission was a co-sponsor of the visit, along with the UCLA California HIV/AIDS Policy Research Center and the Center for HIV Identification, Prevention and Treatment Services at UCLA.

Following Opara’s Luskin Lecture at UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute, Ayako Miyashita Ochoa of the UCLA Luskin Social Welfare faculty moderated a conversation that delved into the most effective ways to strengthen connections among social workers in the field, the research community and those in position to make real policy reforms.

Opara said the guiding principle is keeping the focus on the strengths of children instead of their deficits.

“It’s up to us as adult allies to support them, to show them that they that if they fail, if they make a mistake, we’ll be right there, judgment-free, to support them and lift them up.”

Luskin Lecture by Ijeoma Opara

When Gun Violence Erupts, Social Workers Are First Responders, Advocates and Educators

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UCLA Luskin’s Ron Avi Astor spoke to Social Work Advocates for an article on the role of social workers when gun violence erupts on America’s streets and in schools, churches and homes. Social workers are both first responders and providers of continuing care. They also conduct research, lobby Congress and promote education on the responsible use of firearms. Astor, professor of social welfare and education, shared his research on strategies to prevent school shootings, including a study on the effectiveness of interventions implemented in California. “To our surprise, the numbers showed that there was a dramatic reduction, a huge, huge reduction in day-to-day victimization of kids in California over this 20-year period,” Astor said. “That’s an important story to get out there. What social workers are doing actually matters to kids in their day-to-day lives.”

Read the story

 

Fernando Torres-Gil, a Lifetime of Service and Resiliency  As an educator and public official, the UCLA Luskin professor has spent four decades 'finding a silver lining' amid life’s misfortunes  

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By Stan Paul

Fernando Torres-Gil has worn many hats — including a stylish white fedora he favors — in a long career as an educator and as a public official dating back to the Carter administration. 

As UCLA Luskin Social Welfare celebrates the 75th anniversary of its founding, Torres-Gil will retire after more than three decades helping to advance the School’s educational mission as a professor of social welfare and public policy. He has served as chair of Social Welfare, associate dean and acting dean, as well as founding director of UCLA’s Center for Policy Research on Aging. 

Comparing his early years to the tale of “Forrest Gump,” Torres-Gil said the travails of his “personal circumstances created unexpected opportunities for higher education.”  

His mother, Maria, made education “the first, second and third priority,” Torres-Gil said. “Growing up in Salinas, California, as the second of nine siblings to Mexican farmworkers and an extended immigrant family from Mexico created the likelihood that none of us would go beyond farmwork,” he said. “Factory jobs, at best.” 

And yet, Torres-Gil, his siblings — and later their children — would gain admission to Brandeis University, UCLA and five other University of California campuses, Pomona College, Cal Poly Pomona, San Jose State, USC and Occidental. 

family photos show siblings as children and adults

Family photos show Torres-Gil with siblings as a child and adult.

His mother became an expert at navigating community services. She fought fiercely to avoid foster care and to keep her family intact despite poverty and the “drama and challenges of her circumstances,” which included Fernando contracting polio at six months and becoming unable to walk.  

“To our everlasting gratitude, … after many years of surgical interventions and rehabilitation, I acquired a modicum of mobility,” Torres-Gil said. “This led to key milestones that informed my academic journey.”  

In the 1950s and 1960s, higher education was rarely an option for the children of working-class families from Mexico. Most young Latinos from public housing projects like him ended up in the military, fighting in the Vietnam War. But Torres-Gil’s disability put him on a different course — community college, then San Jose State, where he excelled academically and was active in the Chicano movement.  

Torres-Gil had few role models at the time for the next step — graduate school. “We knew of no Chicanos/Latinos from our region that had ventured afar for graduate education,” he recalled.  

He wound up studying social policy and management at Brandeis University near Boston because he could continue working with the United Farm Workers there to promote a lettuce and grape boycott in New England. He went on to earn master’s and doctorate degrees from Brandeis.  

Torres-Gil chose the emerging fields of gerontology and  geriatrics as his emphasis after attending the 1971 White House  Conference on Aging. He remembers skeptical Chicano friends  in Boston questioning his choice to work with old people, calling  it “depressing” and asking how he would find a job. Fifty years  later, he said, they “are all elders and deeply interested in all things about aging.”   

His circle of contacts expanded to include the Jewish, Irish, Italian and Portuguese communities in New England, and those connections later led to high-level policy and governmental positions. He earned his first presidential appointment in 1978 when President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the Federal Council on Aging. Over the next few decades, he held staff positions or advisory roles during the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.  

As a scholar at both USC and UCLA, his mantra has been to prove himself as an “independent scholar with original ideas” respected by peers. 

Torres-Gil’s research has focused on the politics of aging, health care and long-term care reform, and disability policy. He has continued to provide expertise on aging to elected officials about the intricacies of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Older Americans Act. 

“This has given me a most satisfactory career as a scholar, public servant and policy entrepreneur,” said Torres-Gil, who was recently elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.   

During retirement, he plans to continue being an advocate for older adults, the disabled and the homeless, although mostly at the local level.  

He also wants to continue teaching part time, offering the type of advice to students that has exemplified his own life — to view difficult situations as learning opportunities.  

“Never let misfortune keep you from achieving greater resiliency and … finding a silver lining,” Torres-Gil said. “For any bad breaks I may have had, I’ve had a lot of silver linings.”

How Weather Woes Led Jack Rothman to UCLA Emeritus professor, now 96, tells why he relocated his pioneering academic research on community organizing to sunny California in the 1980s

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By Stan Paul

Jack Rothman was in a rut — literally.

It was winter in the early 1980s and he found himself walking down “automobile tire tracks, you know, trudging along” amid thick snow as he made his way from his job at the University of Michigan to his home about a mile away.

“Why am I doing this as a grown intelligent man living in the winter all the time? I’ve been in New York, Pittsburgh, now Michigan,” the UCLA Luskin emeritus professor recalled thinking. “First chance I get, I’m moving to warm weather, particularly California.”

“It was January. I was writing a paper — my constant preoccupation,” Rothman said. “I hear a voice, ‘This is Dean Leonard Schneiderman, you know, school of social work at UCLA. Would you be willing to come out for an interview visit?’”

Outside his window, it was snowing. “‘You’re darn right. I’ll be out as soon as I can make it,'” he said. It was 80 degrees in Los Angeles during his interview with Schneiderman, former dean of Social Welfare at UCLA. “I had improved my temperature by 70 degrees,” Rothman said. “And that was it.”

He spent the next decade teaching, researching and writing at the Westwood campus. He has been officially retired for three decades, but Rothman’s work, influence and longstanding reputation in the field remain current, according to colleagues and former students.

“He was the first to conceptualize and describe community practice in an academic way as fundamental to the profession,” said JoAnn Damron-Rodriguez, an adjunct professor emerita of social welfare and longtime former faculty member at the Luskin School. She cited his seminal theoretical piece, “Three Models of Community Organization Practice.”

“His textbook on models of community organization became a classic with seven editions and generations of students using these practice approaches to shape their careers,” Damron-Rodriguez said.

More books followed on related areas of practice: case management, intervention research, action-directed agency and community change, community intervention and more.

“All are on a path to structural change related to the same knotty problems social workers confront today,” Damron-Rodriguez said.

Rothman is a prolific writer — with more than 25 scholarly book titles. His “Planning and Organizing for Social Change: Action Principles from Social Science Research” is one of the earliest efforts to formulate systematic, empirically based practice.

About his interest in community organizing, “I was inherently attracted from my early years to values reflecting equality, social justice and anti-racism,” Rothman said. “These ideals were embedded in my family,” who were immigrants who fled the Ukraine in 1920 during the civil war surrounding the Russian Revolution after centuries-long antisemitism.

Following military service in World War II, Rothman entered academia, completing a bachelor’s degree from City College of New York and a master’s degree from the Ohio State University.

“I started my master’s studies in 1949, almost the same time that the UCLA [Social Welfare] school started. And would you believe there were only two schools in the whole United States that had a concentration or major in community organization,” Rothman said.

“I was really on the ground floor. I decided then I would enter the field with the aspiration of  expanding on the ‘Jane Addams’ social change dimension of the profession,” said Rothman, who completed his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1960 with an emphasis on social psychology.

At the time, there were not many graduate programs in social work in the U.S., Rothman said. Today, it’s over 200. “Instead of taking [classes in] community organizing in only two schools, you could probably take it now in the majority of schools … so that’s a really big change,” he said.

‘My hope is that Social Welfare at UCLA continues along the same path and remains one of the major programs in the country.’

In 1984 — the same year Rothman came to UCLA — Marshall Wong MSW ’86 entered UCLA’s social welfare program and was among the first class to take Rothman’s course on community organizing.

Out of 70-plus MSW students in his class, 11 ended up working in the community area, said Wong, who is now a senior intergroup relations specialist for the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations.

“[Rothman] is an extremely modest, amiable person. At the time, I don’t think any of us had any idea of his towering reputation in the field. It took a little while for us to realize,” Wong said.

Rothman’s teaching was foundational for Wong, his classmates and colleagues.

“He really encouraged his students to draw upon their own life experiences as kind of the base for what community organizing techniques and strategies would be effective, and so there was a real, a dynamic relationship between the theoretical and practical,” Wong said.

In 2015, Rothman was honored by the Council on Social Work Education with the Significant Lifetime Achievement in Social Work Education Award and he is the namesake of an annual award for Structural Change Practice by the Special Commission to Advance Macro Practice in Social Work.

Rothman took part in Social Welfare’s 50th anniversary celebration, and he plans to be back on campus for the 75th gala celebration to help mark the program and its achievements.

The Trials — and Triumphs — of Rosina Becerra For almost 50 years as a professor and academic leader, she has taken on whatever challenges UCLA has asked of her

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By Les Dunseith

Dedicated. Self-sacrificing. Hard-working. Underappreciated.

These are words often used to describe America’s social workers — individuals who sacrifice of themselves to provide the safety net for people in need in places like schools, hospitals, mental health facilities and family services agencies.

People like Rosina Becerra.

For 48 of UCLA Social Welfare’s 75 years, she’s been conducting research, teaching and taking on a daunting series of sometimes-thankless administrative challenges in a relentless pursuit of making things better.

Becerra has overseen the field faculty. She’s been a department chair (for more than one department) and a dean. She was a vice provost and a vice chancellor. She has run academic centers and served as a chief financial officer. She’s been a personal mentor to hundreds.

Even after joining the ranks of emeriti professors in 2016, Becerra hasn’t stopped helping out at UCLA. She is a member of the Board of Governors with the Faculty Club. She is president of the executive board for the UCLA Emeriti Association. She served on the campuswide COVID-19 Task Force. She is a special assistant to the vice chancellor for academic personnel.  She’s also helping to plan Social Welfare’s 75th anniversary celebration.

If there’s a need, Becerra steps up.

Take 1998, for example. When then-Chancellor Albert Carnesale identified diversity as one of the areas demanding immediate attention in his “Strategy for a Great University,” an associate vice chancellor for faculty diversity was sought. Becerra, who came to UCLA in 1975 and was the first Latina at UCLA to be tenured in 1981, was selected.

For five years in that role and another three as vice provost of faculty diversity and development, she was responsible for promoting ethnic and gender equality in a place where many white male professors tended to stay on the job for decades.

“It’s not like running a company —  you can’t just fire people and hire new ones,” said Becerra, stressing that the key to success as an academic leader requires gaining the respect of faculty. “They have to feel like someone’s in charge, you know, and listening, and making sure that things are going to get done.”

Fostering diversity is not quite as difficult in a field like social work that tends to attract workers of color, and UCLA’s Social Welfare program has long been more diverse than UCLA as a whole. An emphasis on diversity was accelerated in recent years at the Luskin School, which today has a full-time and ladder faculty that is 50/50 women and men, and 50% faculty of color. The student body is the most diverse in the University of California system.

Still, change often comes slowly in academia, including within social work education.

“In the past, we were, in many ways, a very cloistered profession,” she said. “We had very strict rules about what the curriculum looked like.”

Society has changed, however, and the profession has been evolving. Social work education is changing, too.

Becerra said, “We still have an accrediting body that’s very strict, but it has loosened up in the sense of broadening what is needed in the profession: How do we begin to look at other types of services and what kinds of skills are needed?”

Today’s students do more research and take a more rigorous analytical approach, she said, and that means “more statistical analysis than we used to have.”

“Whether you’re in health or you’re working with children or you’re working with the elderly or you’re looking at race and ethnicity —  these are all areas of social welfare.”

What has not changed is UCLA’s emphasis not just on social work but on social welfare, which encompasses more of the human condition.

“Whether you’re in health or you’re working with children or you’re working with the elderly or you’re looking at race and ethnicity —  these are all areas of social welfare. We have a broader perspective, and that allows UCLA Social Welfare to attract faculty members with broader, interdisciplinary perspectives.”

Identifying and promoting new approaches served Becerra well in finding solutions to problems during her time as associate dean and then dean from 1986 to 1994 in what was then known as the UCLA School of Social Welfare.

She led the field training program through a time of conflict, she recalled, developing a point system that reassured ladder faculty that the field instructors were carrying a fair load of classroom instruction and other duties.

During her tenure as dean, Los Angeles was beset by racial tensions that erupted in violence. (Read more about Social Welfare’s role in helping the city cope during these difficult times.)

This was also a time of intense economic pressure in higher education.

“UCLA was, I think, $33 million in debt,” she recalled. To survive, it became clear that smaller schools like UCLA Social Welfare would be merged with other degree programs into new entities — a forced combination that few faculty members welcomed.

“I could see the writing on the wall. There was no way we were going to avoid this,” she said.

For social welfare education to continue at UCLA meant merging with urban planning and adding public policy to become the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research. But how does that work?

“The argument we laid out was that UCLA is the only department that taught social policy regularly. We taught social policy in child welfare, in mental health and in gerontology. And social policy knowledge was needed in our social service agencies,” she said.

Another thing the three degrees have in common, she thought, was their goal of improving the human condition through policy change.

“The people in public policy are the ones that develop policy. In urban planning, they begin to put some meat on the bones of the policy and figure out how it should be implemented,” Becerra said. “And in social welfare, we implement the policy, and we make it work within the communities and in the institutions.”

She helped the School take its difficult first steps on the path toward what UCLA Luskin is today, but Rosina Becerra knows from firsthand experience that being a university leader is never easy. It takes dedication, sacrifice, hard work, toughness — and perseverance.