‘To me, what I experienced was a clear infringement of academic freedom’
“Should students just play along to go along? Or continue to feel deflated … all in the name of working toward the goal of being ‘anti-racist’ and ‘anti-oppressive’?”
This is a question posed by Arnoldo Cantú, a former student in Colorado State University’s social work doctoral program. His answer: “No, that should not be the experience for any student in the university.”
His meditations on the plight of heterodox-thinking students in contemporary academia came from a recently published article Cantú wrote for a special issue of The Journal of Teaching in Social Work, published in March.
The special issue aims to spark conversations about academic freedom, intellectual diversity, and other divisive topics, such as Israeli-Palestinian conflict debates, according to its editors.
Cantú’s article, “A Case for Intellectual Humility, Tolerance, and Humanism: Perspectives From an Ethnically ‘Minoritized’ Graduate Student,” “provides a ‘brief (critical) autoethnography’ of his experiences as a doctoral student whose learning and well-being were impacted by faculty members’ imposition of the mandate that ‘antiracist’ and ‘antioppressive’ perspectives guide social work scholarship,” the editors wrote.
Born in Mexico and raised in Texas by immigrant parents, Cantú earned a master’s degree in social work and then worked in the field as a clinical social worker and psychotherapist. Much of his professional experience, he wrote, has been with children and their families, many of whom were dealing with poverty and trauma.
After seven years practicing his profession, Cantú told The College Fix in a phone interview, he made the decision to return to school for a doctorate with the hope it would afford him the opportunity to reform problems he saw in his field.
Critical of the DSM, the primary diagnostic manual used by mental health professionals, Cantú said he wanted to help develop alternative frameworks and systems of classification to categorize people’s difficulties.
However, as Cantú details in his article, his return to school was an experience that left him feeling “intimidated, demeaned, and marginalized” due to his failure to display a “full-throated endorsement” of the DEI-based ideology being taught in his classes and pushed by his professors.
“To me, what I experienced was a clear infringement of academic freedom,” he told The Fix via email. More recently, in a guest Substack post for The Multilevel Mailer, he suggested the behavior he witnessed was even cult-like.
The picture Cantú paints of his former program includes a professor who pats themself on the back for how woke they are. Another casually discusses their bisexual identity with students during class, unprompted. A student checks the apparent races of the authors of course reading materials to help ensure white voices are not improperly centered.
Cantú told The Fix this misses the mark for social work.
“There’s definitely a giant disconnect,” he said. “In the field, most of my colleagues either, maybe they go along with [DEI] very minimally if it’s like brought about…but most of my colleagues in the field, we [are] all just like, none of this shit matters…just meet the person where they’re at, to use a cliché.”
“Clients themselves don’t really give a shit either,” he added. “They just need help with their problems. How to stay alive if they’re suicidal. How to get resources.”
In his article, Cantú also recounts a series of more distressing events involving unnamed faculty that ultimately led to his decision to leave his program in the summer of 2024 after three years of work and potentially only one year left to go.
The events, he wrote, began in 2022 after he reached out to a faculty member in his department requesting a letter of recommendation for a fellowship. He does not name the professor in his article. In response, Professor A invited him for coffee early in 2023, indicating a desire to discuss Cantú’s work in more detail and how it intersects with certain DEI tenets.
Over the course of the two hour meeting that followed, according to Cantú, Professor A critiqued Cantú’s failure to address the relationship between our contemporary mental health system and the U.S.’ history of “slavery, colonization, and genocide” in his fellowship application essay and questioned whether he took issues of systemic racism and structural oppression seriously enough.
Cantú wrote he was also interrogated over reports from other professors that he once referred to the term “anti-oppressive” as a “buzzword” in one class and failed to include a pronoun statement in a mock syllabus he submitted as an assignment for another.
When speaking to The Fix, Cantú said he had “no heads up” that these were concerns to faculty in his department, but he believes this clearly indicated faculty were talking about him amongst themselves.
Although reluctant to identify specific faculty, and despite a personal rejection of racial categories, Cantú said he could appreciate the irony that the faculty members who took greatest issue with his lack of commitment to DEI “were indeed your stereotypical racialized white women.”
Most of the faculty in his department could be described that way, he added, also noting, “I don’t think they had, at least recently had, practice experience.”
After that meeting, Cantú said, his interactions with faculty seemed more awkward than before. Additionally, he noted, he had difficulty getting faculty to serve on his doctoral committee or help him attain funding to support himself upon finding out at the last minute another funding source was not being renewed.
By Cantú’s account in his article, the funding issue may have been standard for his school, although the refusal of faculty to be on a student’s doctoral committee was not.
These issues, coupled with a sense that he was disconnected from his school and that things would be even more awkward for him once he publicly wrote about his experiences, Cantú said, ultimately led to his decision to withdraw from his program and not look back.
“If not asked to leave,” he told The Fix, “I would have been under a microscope all the more.”
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