Edwin Sasaki, Interim Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences

Response to Academic Realignment, p. 1

Memorandum

Date:April 2, 2009

To: Provost Soraya Coley

CC:President Horace Mitchell

Edwin Sasaki, Interim Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences

Jess Deegan, Chair of the Academic Senate

From:Department of Psychology

Subject:Response to the Academic Realignment for the Future proposal

______

After discussing the academic realignment proposal in two department meetings, the Psychology faculty wishesto respond to the part of the proposal that would move the M.S. in Counseling Psychology program to the new School of Human Services and Education.

Three points will be addressed in this document. First, we will argue that CSUB should reaffirm its commitment to training Marriage and Family Therapists for our local community. We include this because in our last two meetings with you, you have questioned the need to train such students at CSUB given other counselor training programs. Having established the need for MFT training, we will argue that MFTs would be best trained as graduate students within the Department of Psychology, contrary to the intent of the realignment proposal. Finally, we will describe the circumstances under which the Psychology faculty would be willing to assume responsibility for a quality Counseling Psychology program.

The Need for MFT Training at CSUB

• MFTs play a unique role in our community. The primary role of MFTs is to provide direct individual, couples, and group psychotherapy services to clients in the community. LCSWs may provide psychotherapy, but their training and roles are more diverse, including case management and coordination of services. School counselors may provide limited psychotherapy services to their students, but their counselor-to-student ratios, which may exceed 1:250, preclude much one-on-one work. School counselors often refer students requiring individual psychotherapy to agencies in the community that employ a large number of MFTs, like the Henrietta Weill Memorial Child Guidance Clinic described below.

• MFTs have played and will continue to play strong leadership roles in the local public mental health community. For example, prior to the current interim director (who is a Ph.D. psychologist), the Director of Kern County Mental Health for several years was Diane Koditek, an MFT. Another example is the Henrietta Weill Memorial Child Guidance Clinic. It is one of the largest providers of mental health services to KernCounty school children and has an MFT as its clinical director andMFTs as clinic managers at all four of its community clinics.

• MFTs are also major providers of direct clinical services in public mental health settings. At the Kern County Mental Health Department, MFTs and MFT interns make up 67% of the professional workforce; by comparison, social workers and social work interns, who provide case management services in addition to counseling, make up only 17%. Psychologists represent 6% and psychiatrists 10% of KCMH’s professional workforce. At the Henrietta Weill Clinic, 19 of their counselors are MFTs or MFT interns; only 3 are social workers or social work interns.

• MFTs also play a significant role in KernCounty as private providers of mental health services. Unlike urban centers, includingLos Angeles and San Francisco where Ph.D.-level clinical psychologists are plentiful, Bakersfield has few licensed psychologists. MFTs take up this slack as the major providers of private practice mental health services in Bakersfield.

• In summary, MFTs provide unique and necessary direct mental health services to clients in the local community. They provide these services in both public mental health and private practice settings. Their unique skill setsalign with leadership roles in many of the settings in which they are employed.

Reasons to Move Counseling Psychology to Psychology Rather than the School of HS&E

• The Psychology faculty agree that housing Counseling Psychology under a single school would be far more desirable than the current arrangement where it is shared between two different schools (HSS and SOE). The joint program was never our idea;it was a cost-cutting measure forced upon us by a previous provost. We agree that students would be better served by a program “owned” by one school and department; we think, however, that school should be Humanities and Social Sciences, and that departmentPsychology.

• Despite some misinformation to the contrary, MFT programs do not require accreditation;they do not share this costly characteristic with programs in Education and Social Work. Accreditation of MFT programs is possible—and has been pushed by SOE faculty for years—but this is not a requirement for licensure. If Counseling Psychology goes to HS&E, we would expect Education faculty to continue to lobby for expensive accreditation. Psychology faculty have never supported seeking accreditation because of the wasteful and unnecessary use of resources.Part of the accreditation confusion may have arisen because state licensure requirements do, in fact, mandate the content of certain preparatory courses and student-to-faculty supervision ratiosfor two—only two—clinical courses.

• According to the working draft proposal, one reason for placing Counseling Psychology in HS&E would be to “buttress cooperative programming.” If we think this through, however, cooperative programming will be necessary regardless of where the program resides. For example, if Psychologynow teaches a course in treatment planning that Social Work and School Counseling faculty also teach, the programs might decide to consolidate their offeringsby having Psychology teach the course to all three programs. Whether Counseling Psychology resided in HS&E or HSS would not affect our ability to do this.For Psychology to contribute to the Counseling Psychology program, inter-school cooperation will be necessary, regardless of Counseling Psychology’s home school.

• Counseling Psychology is an extension of the undergraduate Psychology major in a more direct way than Social Work or School Counseling are extensions of other undergraduate majors. While all three graduate majors build on undergraduate behavioral sciences knowledge, only Counseling Psychology is so closely tied to the undergraduate Psychology major. Almost all Counseling Psychology students arrive with undergraduate degrees in Psychology; the same cannot be said for Social Work and School Counseling. It should not be surprising, therefore, that an applied psychology masters that is housed outside the Department of Psychology will have less appeal to our undergraduates considering graduate school.

• Psychology’s undergraduate program would be strengthened by having practicing clinicians from the Counseling Psychology program teach undergraduate courses. Recently, the department determined that we must do more to increase our relevance to students with applied interests. Closer alignment with an applied graduate program would help. Also, when undergraduates know more faculty in the Counseling Psychology program, Psychology will become a better feeder to the program.

• Marriage and family therapists are professional psychology practitioners. In California, unlike some other states, we have no specific license for masters level psychologists (psychologists are only recognized at the doctoral level). MFTs are the de facto masters level practicing psychologists in the state of California. They should be selected and trained primarily by psychologists and other MFTs.

• The Department of Psychology has a reputation at CSUB for doing what we do well; this is one reason so many of our faculty are promoted to positions of responsibility across the campus. Although we recognize the intent of changing school boundaries is to draw a line between the past and the future, it is not clear that shifting boundaries will change the culture of the new school. Simply put, the Department of Psychology can run the Counseling Psychology program better.

• As stated earlier, we see a strong need for continued training of MFTs. We recognize, however, that if Counseling Psychology is housed in a school whose emphasis is education and social work, the program will become an orphan without strong disciplinary advocates. We predict that under such circumstances, Counseling Psychology will cease to exist within a few short years.

What Psychology Wants and Needs

• We think the Counseling Psychology program should move to Psychology.

• We want the resources needed to maintain a high quality program. The competition (e.g., La Verne, University of Phoenix, NationalUniversity) provides convenience at a cost, but we have been consistently told by those who supervise and hire that CSUB alumni are clearly better prepared to be in the clinical trenches. Psychology does not want to participate in a second-rate discount program.

• Over the last two decades clinically experienced Psychology members (Dietiker, Cohen, Rienzi, Ishida, and Bacon) and Education faculty (Ritter, Papen-Daniel, Barret-Cruse, Carlson, and Martinez) have contributed to various iterations of MFT training at CSUB. Today, only Ishida (30 WTU), Bacon (8 WTU), and Ritter (36 WTU) are the core faculty. More than half (47 WTUs) of our 90-unit program is taught by part-time faculty. The lack of core faculty and role models as well as variable teaching skills in adjunctive hires has adversely affected the coherence and quality of the program.

• In order to staff the program adequately, we would need two new full-time faculty lines (half of one line could support our undergraduate program). Note that these are not additions, but needed replacements. We would also need Dr. Ritter to move to Psychology; given that she is near retirement, we would need assurances that her position would be replaced by a full-time faculty line.

• We would want to maintain primary control over the University Counselor Training Clinic. The CPSY program has worked hard over the years to build the clinic and would not want to be squeezed out by or compete for scarce clients with other programs that need it less. We recognize that the clinic is a major asset of the university and that other departments—notably Social Work and School Counseling—now want to share it. We will let others make their own arguments, but it is unclear to us why School Counseling whose work, by definition, takes place in primary and secondary schools would want access to a university clinic, or why social work, which emphasizes case management and coordination of services, would be interested in a clinic that offers no adjunctive services.

• If we could not get university support for a quality MFT-training program, managed by the Department of Psychology within the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, we would likely reduce our participation in the program. We have been sacrificing our undergraduate offerings in clinical areas to support the CPSY program. With no control and little stake in the program, there would be few incentives to continue making such sacrifices.