UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare

The School of Social Welfare of the University of California, Berkeley, was established June 1, 1944 and is located in Haviland Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Its focus is preparing social work professionals for the public and nonprofit sectors. Berkeley Social Welfare offers an Undergraduate Major in Social Welfare with the College of Letters and Science (L&S), the M.S.W., and the Ph.D. Haviland Hall includes its own library, founded in 1957, which contains approximately 34,400 volumes and 200 active serial titles. The library originally housed volumes specifically for the social work field but was expanded in 2014 to include education, psychology and public policy.

Social welfare as a field of study was originally located in the Economics Department and was called "social economics". Professor Jessica Blanche Peixotto, the second woman to earn at Ph.D. at Berkeley, was hired in 1904 to teach courses in sociology and by 1912 had shaped a curriculum in social economics focused on the poor. Professor Peixotto became the first woman at Berkeley to achieve tenured faculty status in 1918. Along with her colleagues, Lucy Ward Stebbins and Emily Noble Plehn, they developed a graduate-level curriculum in social work that same year. By 1927 these courses led to certificates in child and family services and in medical social work. An independent Department of Social Welfare was established in 1939 and the certificates were replaced with a professional Master of Arts degree in 1942. Professor Harry Cassidy, the Public Welfare Director for British Columbia became the first Dean of the new School of Social Welfare in 1944. He insisted the program be called "social welfare" to encompass more than social work.[4]