AAUP Publishes Final Report, Regulation of Research on Human Subjects: Academic Freedom and the Institutional Review Board

The American Association of University Professors has published the final version of Regulation of Research on Human Subjects: Academic Freedom and the Institutional Review Board, prepared by a subcommittee (of which I am a member) of the Association’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

The report explains,

As things now stand, the IRB system assembles local committees whose members have no special competence in assessing research projects in the wide range of disciplines they are called on to assess, whose approval is required for an only minimally restricted range of research projects and who are invited to bring to bear in assessing them an only minimally restricted body of what they take to be information, who are only minimally restricted in the demands they may make on the researchers, and whose judgments about whether to permit the research to be carried out at all are, in most institutions, final. When one steps back from it, one can find oneself amazed that such an institution has developed on university campuses across the country.