A graduate student at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit institution in California, is sounding the alarm on what she calls a disturbing shift in therapy education — one that trades clinical neutrality for ideological activism. 

Naomi Epps Best, who was terminated June 12 from her therapy internship following her criticism of the program, first went public in a June 6 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. She described her experience in a required human sexuality course that included bondage videos, sexually explicit exercises, and what she called “a case study in the reshaping of therapy training — not by science but by critical theory.”

Best described walking out of a class where Professor Chongzheng Wei played a bondage video featuring a female “influencer.” When the video ended, the professor reportedly asked the class if they wanted to try the act themselves. 

“Maybe it was a crass joke to break the tension,” Best wrote, “but I didn’t want to find out if a live demonstration was next.”

Her story has since drawn national attention and prompted internal correspondence at Santa Clara, including a letter that Best shared publicly June 13. The letter was allegedly sent from the department to the university’s Board of Fellows defending the course and its compliance with state licensure standards.

Best’s initial accommodation request — to avoid submitting a “comprehensive sexual autobiography” discussing deeply personal topics, including early sexual memories and masturbation — was denied by the department chair, Cary Watson. Watson characterized the course as an “inoculation” against future encounters with sexually explicit content in clinical practice. She even suggested Best consider a different license if she was uncomfortable with the requirements.

In a second attempt to complete the course, Best encountered even more controversial content: songs laced with sexual vulgarities and racial slurs, a guest speaker who spoke graphically about gender identity and arousal, and exercises that asked students to write down what they disliked about their own bodies for public classroom reading.

In another required course, Multicultural Counseling, Best was told that traits like “objective, rational, linear thinking,” “delayed gratification,” and “making a plan for the future” were examples of “white culture.” She was required to preface mock therapy sessions by “naming [her] whiteness” and warning clients that her perspective might be skewed due to her race. 

In the Human Sexuality course, students were told to affirm a child’s belief in being the opposite sex after only six months of “gender distress” — even when signs of trauma or autism were present.

“These ideas are being promoted by the field’s top bodies,” Best wrote, pointing to guidelines from the American Psychological Association (APA), the American Counseling Association, and other accrediting organizations. 

“Therapists influence decisions about ‘gender transition,’ family custody, school discipline and even criminal sentencing,” she continued. “When clinicians are trained to see everything through an ideological lens, rather than with ethical neutrality, the consequences extend far beyond the therapy room.”

After exhausting appeals to school leadership, including the university president and campus ministry, Best was left with an ultimatum: withdraw, pay out of pocket for continuing education, and tack on extra units to graduate — without a tuition refund.

“My objections weren’t treated as signs of a systemic issue but as a personal grievance to be managed quietly,” she wrote. 

Her anonymous post on Substack later confirmed for her that these experiences weren’t isolated but indicative of a wider ideological takeover of therapy education.

“The entire field of educating therapy has been hollowed out and filled in with critical theory,” she said. “Therapists are no longer trained to be neutral; they’re trained to be agents of political change. Concepts like modesty and marital privacy aren’t merely treated as optional or even dismissed. They’re seen as oppressive norms to be actively combated.”

Shortly after Best’s op-ed was published by WSJ, she was terminated from her therapy internship. 

In a June 12 X post, she wrote, “Blew the whistle in [WSJ] on ideological rigidity in therapy training. A week later, I am fired from my internship with the regret of my boss. This field is in crisis. The public needs to know.”

The next day, Best shared what she described as an internal letter from the university to its Board of Fellows, defending the course as fulfilling state licensure standards and asserting that the content was “similar to all other graduate programs across the state.” 

The letter also claimed that the university’s faculty “take great care to let students know that they understand the sensitive nature of the topics addressed in this course” and are “committed to addressing together any concerns any students may have.”

In her response, Best accused the university of misleading its own leadership, stating that “required ‘comprehensive sexual autobiographies’ are NOT standard across graduate programs” and pointing out that the APA bars required sexual self-disclosure.

“Further, I wonder why no one took my complaint of ethical and legal violations seriously in the administration if ‘each of us cares deeply about the experience of every student,’” Best wrote. “President [Julie] Sullivan has been aware of this since September 2024 and I have not received a word from her.”