The School of Social Work at the University of Minnesota is a top-ranked graduate school of social work. The University of Minnesota School of Social Work, established in 1917, is the oldest graduate social work program in public land grant university. In addition, the doctoral program, established in 1946, is the oldest doctoral social work program in a public university. The UMSSW is currently a part of the College of Education and Human Development. The UMSSW moved to the St. Paul, Minnesota campus in 2000 to a newly renovated, state-of-the-art building.
The Master of Social Work (MSW) program is consistently ranked among the top 20 MSW programs in the nation by the U.S. News & World Report. Students may choose full-time, part-time, week-end, advanced standing and distance options for completing their MSW. The SSW is a pioneer in providing MSW distance education options, with programs offered over interactive television and the Internet. The SSW offers MSW programs focusing on direct practice or community practice. The community practice program, with specializations in human services management and community organizing & advocacy, is the only one of its kind in the upper midwest. In addition, there are joint programs with the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and the School of Public Health. The SSW also offers a research-based doctoral program, and three undergraduate minors in social justice, youth studies and family violence prevention.
The 24 tenure line faculty are among the most productive social work scholars in the nation. They are leading researchers in public social services, including child welfare and aging; violence prevention; youth studies; mental health; disability policy, and social welfare history. The SSW is home to six research and training centers, including the Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare (CASCW), the Minnesota Center Against Violence and Abuse (MINCAVA), The Center for Restorative Justice and Peacemaking (CRJP), and the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community (IDVAAC) . In addition, a nationally recognized historical collection, the Social Welfare History Archives, is housed at the University of Minnesota campus.
Famous quotes containing the words university of, university, school, social and/or work:
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“I never went near the Wellesley College chapel in my four years there, but I am still amazed at the amount of Christian charity that school stuck us all with, a kind of glazed politeness in the face of boredom and stupidity. Tolerance, in the worst sense of the word.... How marvelous it would have been to go to a women’s college that encouraged impoliteness, that rewarded aggression, that encouraged argument.”
—Nora Ephron (b. 1941)
“A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Your children and grandchildren will have their share of happiness; there’s no need to work a like a horse for them.”
—Chinese proverb.