CU-Boulder Retracts IRB Claim

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Mark Miller, the University of Colorado at Boulder spokesman who had earlier suggested that professors should consult the IRB before teaching controversial subjects, has retracted that suggestion.

[Peter Schmidt, “U. of Colorado’s Response to a Gritty Lecture Worries Sociologists,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 17, 2013. http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-Colorados-Response-to-a/143653/. (gated)]

CU-Boulder Tells Faculty to Consult IRB Before Teaching

A spokesman for the University of Colorado at Boulder has recommended that university faculty consult the IRB before teaching.

The comment concerns sociology professor Patti Adler's announcement that she plans to retire early rather than risk being fired for classroom teaching that might make students uncomfortable.

[Scott Jaschik, “Tenured Professor at Boulder Says She Is Being Forced out over Lecture on Prostitution," Inside Higher Ed, December 16, 2013. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/16/tenured-professor-boulder-says-she-being-forced-out-over-lecture-prostitution.]

Northeastern U. IRB Makes Sex Research Untenable

Carey Noland, associate professor of communcation studies at Northeastern University, complains that "many IRBs . . . seem to have difficulty accurately assessing the potential harm involved with qualitative research on sex."

[Carey M. Noland, “Institutional Barriers to Research on Sensitive Topics: Case of Sex Communication Research Among University Students.” Journal of Research Practice 8, no. 1 (November 24, 2012): Article M2, http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/332/262]

Dreger on Naming Names

Alice Dreger explains why historians are reluctant to promise either anonymity or nonmaleficence:

Real accountability requires real names.

It Can Happen to Anyone

On Saturday, my Journal of Policy History article, "How Talking Became Human Subjects Research: The Federal Regulation of the Social Sciences, 1965–1991," was honored with that journal's Ellis Hawley Prize. In presenting the prize, Professor Hawley--one of the leaders of my profession--mentioned that he himself used to ask his students to interview someone who had lived through the Great Depression. On being told that he would have to submit to IRB review, he abandoned the assignment. If IRBs can deter Ellis Hawley from learning more about the 1930s, we have a problem.

White, "Institutional Review Board Mission Creep"

Ronald F. White, a professor of philosophy at the College of Mount St. Joseph, is fed up with IRB review of the social sciences: "Institutional Review Board Mission Creep: The Common Rule, Social Science, and the Nanny State," Independent Review 11 (Spring 2007): 547-564.

Much of the piece will be familiar to those who have followed recent IRB debates, but I did enjoy White's first-hand account:

My IRB experience with graduate student projects on leadership was eye opening. A colleague and I taught the course. We spent hours checking student IRB forms, and half the semester was consumed in getting their protocols past the committee chair. All of these projects involved harmless interviews and questionnaires to be done in the workplace. The overwhelming majority of the students' employers not only supported their research, but in many instances were paying for them to attend graduate school. All of my students found the IRB debacle to be nitpicking nonsense. Many of them ultimately received an "incomplete" for the course. It would be convenient simply to blame our IRB chair for this debacle. However, that person was not only a highly competent and cooperative IRB chair and an established social scientist, but also an extraordinarily cooperative friend of mine. In short, the IRB fiasco is not about persons, but about a system.

After that initial experience, the program redefined the project so that all students could get IRB approval by providing the same answers on the form. This adaptation made IRB compliance less onerous, but it severely limited the student's choice of topics and deprived them of the opportunity to do real science. Since then, the course has introduced a whole new kind of research option for students that avoids IRB involvement. I surmise that in most educational settings, the demands of IRB compliance have led to requiring topics and projects that are easier to get past boards.

There are a couple of points here. First, as Robert Kerr has noted, research delay may be research denied, so we should not take at face value IRB claims about the low percentage of projects that are rejected outright. Second, boilerplate approval processes may lead to boilerplate research--the chilling effect that IRB critics have noted for decades.

What intrigues me most is how a philosopher got snared in this mess, and I hope to learn more about the course and the research White's students were pursuing.