Middle East Studies Association Newsletter, Summer 2001.

Juan R. I. Cole

History, University of Michigan

There is no doubt that Institutional Review Boards perform a key service to the academic and social science community in overseeing any research project that involves experimenting on human beings. As genetic engineering and biotechnology make advances, the promise of advances in human health and longevity is offset by the specter of experiments gone awry because of poor protocols. IRBs are necessary to ensure that as few human beings as possible are damaged by poorly thought out procedures.¹

Institutional Review Boards, however, have often not been content to oversee experimentation on human beings. In many instances, described recently by Christopher Shea, they have claimed oversight over the non-experimental research of sociologists, anthropologists and even historians and literature specialists.² This claim is extremely problematic and poses, I firmly believe, a significant threat to the first amendment rights of all academics. It should be vigorously and loudly combated. This claim derives from a simple category error. Conducting research on what people think or remember is simply not the same as conducting experiments on them. It is true that when anthropologists live for a year in a village in Turkey, they inevitably have an impact on peoples’ lives. As long as they break neither Turkish nor U.S. law and do nothing academically unethical, however, there can be no restriction on them living where they please and speaking to whom they please. Likewise, there are already standards and practices guides from the American Historical Association governing use of private papers and oral interviews that spell out what is ethical, and it is undesirable that these restrictions be extended or added to. Yet the American Historical Association without any public debate blithely acknowledged the legitimacy of IRB oversight of historians who engage in oral history.

The idea that one forfeits one’s right to speak to members of the public when one takes up an academic position is bizarre and dangerous to civil society. Russell Jacoby has pointed to the decline of the public intellectual that has accompanied the academization of intellectual life in the United States. One rather imagines the decline will be hastened if IRBs can decided whether we can so much as interview union workers about their past strikes and report on their travails! The political fall-out of these restrictions could be large, and their implication is anti-progressive. An IRB at Rutgers University asserted oversight over an oral history project that would have prevented the interviewers from asking their subjects “stressful questions.” The historians involved simply said they would not, although it is obviously impossible to conduct oral history without risking evoking painful memories. There has been no oral history project on the survivors of the Lebanese Civil War, and apparently some IRBs would insist that there be none. Surely such interviews would be “stressful” for all concerned.

An IRB at Duke University insisted that MESA member Kathy Ewing get signed consent forms from all interviewees at a mosque in Berlin before interviewing them, and forbade her from speaking to minors there without further red tape. The idea that persons from the Middle East would be comfortable signing prior consent forms, or that one could avoid speaking to children at a mosque where children’s classes are routinely held, is clearly unrealistic. And, in fact, Ewing admits that she was invited to speak to a children’s class informally and accepted.³ UC Berkeley’s Ann Swidler commented that IRBs “turn everyone into a low-level cheater.”⁴ Sherry Buckley, manager of Berkeley’s IRB, was quoted by Shea as saying, “It’s an honor to go out and talk to the public and intrude on their lives and ask questions.”⁵ This sentiment is extremely disturbing. It says that what the Founding Fathers inscribed as a right in the constitution (to speak freely and associate freely) is being reconfigured by IRB’s as a privilege that may be withdrawn at will. Clearly, neither freedom of speech nor freedom of association gives an academic a right to behave illegally or unethically. There are laws and university regulations, as well as guidelines from professional associations, to regulate illegal and unethical behavior. IRB’s are unnecessary as watchdogs of our “honor” of interacting with “the public” (as if we do not form part of the public).

It is only a matter of time until careers begin being ruined (and some have already been threatened) when a particularly high-handed IRB begins holding academics to these unrealistic procedures and standards. But careers are hardly all that is at stake. The very freedoms of speech and association are under assault here. It is frankly Orwellian that such considerations should be raised at all. IRB oversight is mandated by Federal law with regard to Federal grants for research on human subjects. Academics receiving Federal monies for research that falls within those guidelines have no choice but to cooperate. Many universities, however, have begun recognizing IRB’s as suitable oversight bodies for the research of all faculty on campus that involves any contact with human beings. Three strategies might therefore be implemented to fight this creeping threat to free inquiry. Some historians and other social scientists have engaged in non-cooperation, and simply refused to contact their IRB about research that does not in fact involve experimenting on anyone. IRB’s typically only conduct investigations of faculty who voluntarily contact them. Second, faculty must become activitists with their own administration in rolling back the range of oversight claimed by IRB’s with regard to projects not funded by Federal monies. And, they must lobby their representatives in Congress to change the wording of the law so as to restrict IRB’s to approving projects that involve experimentation on or operating on human beings, removing from their purview the soft social sciences. Our professional societies, such as MESA and the American Historical Association, should play an activist role in representing us in this regard. The first time an IRB can be shown to have done real damage to an academic’s career, a carefully planned lawsuit on first amendment grounds might well prevail in the courts.

Notes

1. Jeffrey Brainard, “Panel Proposes New Guidelines for Research with Human Subjects,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 12, 2001, online at http://proquest.umi.com/.

2. Christopher Shea, “Don’t Talk to the Humans: The Crackdown on Social Science Research,” Lingua Franca, vol. 10, no. 6, September 2000, online at www.linguafranca.com.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.