Lodging social work education within institutions of higher learning in the early twentieth century led to predictable tensions between academic and professional norms, expectations, and purposes partly because of the conflicts inherent in being an explicitly value-based profession with longstanding aspirations to be scientific. Social work students once were taught to view each person as a unique individual with the capacity for self-direction and freedom within the legal and normative bounds of our society. Now, social work students learn to parse and judge people's location within the system of oppression -- victim or perpetrator -- by virtue of their identities.