Beware! I think the blogger who wrote that article has an axe to grind,* and he's misinterpreted the University's letter.

The key bit of the post is:

The university went on to cite they have realized after careful consideration there is a “lack of credible and excellent international research available regarding social work studies in existence" and for that apparent reason, it was decided the courses will no longer be taught at their university.

But that "lack of credible and excellent international research" quotation doesn't appear in the university's letter — it's the blogger's own misleading paraphrase. The actual letter is rather more vague, but it looks like the university's closing the programme because it's not generating enough important-looking research to get a solid research ranking. This is very different to there being no credible social work research in general!

The tipoff for me is the letter's reference to "internationally excellent research", which is a UK academic buzzword (buzzphrase?). It comes from the UK's Research Excellence Framework (formerly the RAE), which tries to grade individual university departments on their research.

Presumably the University of Southampton, expecting its social work department to get a substandard REF rating, has preemptively scrapped the department to focus resources on other departments ("We are therefore channelling our resources into the University’s greatest research strengths").

* He writes that eugenics has become the objective of social services, and claims to have "created the discipline of social service crimes research". But Googling the phrase "social service crimes research" turns up no research, just chatter on Facebook, YouTube, and blogs. He's just dignified his disapproval towards social workers by putting a fancy label on it.