Leonard Pitts, Jr. is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald.

Harriet Lerner is an author and psychologist, currently in private practice in Lawrence.

Citing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s statement that “time is neutral,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. disputes the idea that time will bring progress on its own.

“We cannot wish for it,” Pitts told an audience Friday at the Kansas Union. “We have to work for it.”

Pitts was one of the keynote speakers at the Kansas University School of Social Welfare’s Social Work Day 2014, an event devoted to informing and celebrating social workers. Author and psychologist Harriet Lerner also gave a keynote speech as part of Social Work Day. Altogether, the event drew more than 500 alumni, students and faculty, according to organizers.

Pitts, a nationally syndicated columnist, college professor, radio producer and novelist, credited social workers with doing the tough, everyday work of trying to improve the lives of Americans, and the country itself.

“Some of us find it hard to hear cries for help and turn our ears to stone,” Pitts said. “Some of us find it hard to look at the distance between America the reality and America the dream and just ignore it and pretend we have not seen what we have seen.

“And isn’t this at least part of the reason that you find yourselves compelled to do the often thankless work of trying to help those people in our society, the many in our society, that other people neither hear nor see? … If nobody has said it to you lately, thank you for that,” he said.

Pitts also spoke at length on the difference between America’s ideals and its history.

Pointing to recent events such as the George Zimmerman trial and the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act, Pitts said the country’s current political climate and discourse are “colder, and nastier, and more hostile” than many would have thought possible a generation ago.

In her morning talk, Lerner looked less at the political environment that social workers operate in and more at deeply personal concerns, which social workers often deal with as therapists.

Lerner was a staff psychologist at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka for more than 30 years and a faculty member in the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry. She has authored 11 books, including the New York Times bestseller “The Dance of Anger.” Currently she is in private practice in Lawrence.

On Friday, Lerner spoke about confronting difficult issues in relationships. Offering an example from her own life, she mentioned speaking with her mother more than 20 years ago about some of her father’s “less reputable behaviors.”

“If you think this is easy, you just haven’t done it,” Lerner said.

Lerner offered audience members eight “steps to courageous acts of change” people can make themselves to affect important relationships.

Each came with nuance and caveats. For instance, one of Lerner’s steps called on listeners to “say what you think and feel about things that matter.”

At the same time, she added: “In the name of truth or the name of authenticity, people bludgeon each other.” Hence the subsequent step: Refrain from sharing thoughts when appropriate.