The school was the first at Washington University to admit Black students,[3] and the first in the United States to have a building dedicated to social work education.
[5] The program was initially called the Washington University Training Course for Social Workers and belonged to the Department of Sociology in the College of Liberal Arts.
[6] The Department of Social Work expanded over the next ten years to employ nine full-time and 15 part-time faculty members teaching 65 courses.
When Throop resigned in 1944, the Department appealed to the Board of Directors, establishing the George Warren Brown School of Social Work in the following year.
[10] Bruno was instrumental in boosting the public welfare administrator Benjamin E. Youngdahl[11] to the deanship of the new school, although his candidacy had been challenged due to his perceived lack of academic training.
[18] Existing faculty resisted these changes, and implementation was further slowed by a controversial, year-long leave of absence taken by Vasey in 1964 to lead the St. Louis Human Development Corportation, a newly-formed, local anti-poverty organization.
While the School passed, the CSWE criticized what it perceived as unresponsiveness to larger changes in social work education as well as Vasey's involvement in national politics.
[20] Despite vigorous defense from the faculty, Vasey resigned to teach at the University of Michigan following a series of critical letters from Chancellor Thomas H. Eliot.
Chancellor William Danforth, concerned about the state of the Brown School amid what faculty member Ralph Pumphrey described as "the verge of disintegration" with "standing committees ground to a halt",[23] appointed Ronald Feldman as acting dean with the task of finding new leadership to stabilize its reputation.
During his tenure, Khinduka convened faculty and students to instate a competency-based curriculum, building off of Nancy Carroll's critique of the School's decades of individualized, elective-heavy design.
This resulted in the Brown School becoming recognized in 1991 as the most published faculty body in the country between 1977-1987, as well as the origin of "evidence-based practice" as a central theme in national social work discourse.
During his deanship, Lawlor oversaw the creation of Hillman Hall, which again doubled the Brown School's space on the Washington University campus.
[30] Throughout this time, Lawlor and the Brown School played a critical role in the creation of Washington University's Institute for Public Health.
[36] In October of 2023, Washington University in St. Louis announced its intent to form an independent School of Public Health[37] as part of a 10-year strategic plan entitled "Here and Next".
This includes utilizing integrated administrative data to inform child welfare and multi-system responses, as well as improving the science of newborn screening for maltreatment risk and engaging new parents in supportive services.
Through a population approach, the SMART Africa Center aims to improve child mental health by bringing together a diverse consortium of stakeholders.
This consortium includes academic institutions, government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and community partners from Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, and the United States.
[40] The building was named after Alvin Goldfarb, a St. Louis area philanthropist who was the former president of Worth Stores and chairman the Jewish Federation of St.