George Mason University Frees Oral History

George Mason University, my employer and my home, has issued a new Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) on Histories and Journalism, modeled closely on the excellent policies at Columbia and University of California, San Diego.

The CITI Program as Mortifyingly Stupid, Marxist Doxology

The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues has posted videos and transcripts of its Meeting Five, held May 18 and 19 in New York City. I earlier linked to the Commission's summary of the statement by Ronald Bayer, professor and co-chair of the Center for the History of Ethics of Public Health at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Now that we have the verbatim text, it is worth quoting as well.

Overall, Bayer lamented that the IRB system has "turned itself into an object of ridicule and sometimes contempt in a way that I think is dangerous to those who believe in the ethical conduct of research."

Particularly choice is Bayer's description of the CITI Program, a widely used online training course in research ethics, which Columbia University requires researchers to complete every three years.

Ethics Experts Stupefied by a "Nitpicking Monster"

blog.Bioethics.gov, the official blog of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, reports on two experts' frustration with the gap between the good intentions behind the IRB system and the depressing reality faced by researchers.

Columbia University Grants Oral History Exclusion

Mary Marshall Clark, director of Columbia University's Oral History Research Office, has announced on H-Oralhist that the university yesterday approved a new policy on IRB review of oral history research. The policy notes that

Oral history interviews, that only document specific historical events or the experiences of individuals or communities over different time periods would not constitute "human subjects research" as they would not support or lead to the development of a hypothesis in a manner that would have predictive value. The collection of such information, like journalism, is generally considered to be a biography, documentary, or a historical record of the individual's life or experience; or of historical events. Oral history interviews of individuals is not usually intended to be scientific or to produce generalizable information and hence is not usually considered 'research' in accordance with the federal regulations or CU policy. Therefore, such oral history activities should not be submitted to the CU IRB for review.

Still covered by IRB jurisdiction are psychological studies that borrow some oral history techniques to test hypotheses. An example might be Kim T. Buehlman, John M. Gottman, and Lynn Fainsilber Katz, "How a Couple Views Their Past Predicts Their Future: Predicting Divorce from an Oral History Interview," Journal of Family Psychology 5 (March/June 1992): 295-318.

I hope Columbia will prove a model for other universities; in lumine tuo videbimus lumen.