OAH
volume 1 / number 2 / November 2011
OUTLOOK
A membership newsletter of the Photo by Eileen Barroso
Historians and the Institutional Review Board From the OAH President Alice Kessler-Harris
W
hy should you vote in the upcoming OAH election? One good reason is because the executive board of our organization makes decisions that can deeply influence your life, and you should want people holding office who care about you and know you care about them. This past week I spent a good deal of time drafting a response to a call by the Office of Human Research Protections (a division of the Department of Health and Human Services) for comments on its “Common Rule.” If you don’t know what this is, don’t worry; I didn’t either until my swift education of the past several weeks. It turns out that the rule (also known as the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects) is the framework that governs the Institutional Review Boards (irbs)
A fieldworker (left) interviews a subject as part of the Paterson New Jersey Folklife Project. (Library of Congress, Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center.)
that oversee research projects in every institution that receives federal funding. Every university (and most colleges) in the country have an irb. Originally intended to monitor human-subjects research in the biomedical sciences, irbs were established in the 1990s to ensure that ethical lapses, such as the one that resulted in the Tuskegee experiment, did not again occur. Very quickly, the reign of the irb spread to the social sciences where it was believed that human subjects might be endangered by interview techniques that threatened mental health, imposed unacceptable levels of stress, or infringed on the privacy of subjects. In a process called “mission creep,” many irbs began to demand that everyone who wanted to talk to anyone else in the course of their research seek prior permission before doing so. Journalists quickly found a way to exclude themselves from these rules. So, briefly, did historians engaged in oral history. But then chaos set in. Five or six years ago, irbs started to insist that historians, too, submit plans to interview even a handful of idiosyncratically selected individuals for prior review. Claiming that they would simply exempt those proposals that did not fall under their aegis, the boards nevertheless expanded their purview. If you haven’t heard of any of this, you have been lucky. For several chaotic years, irbs have exercised what, in my view, seems like unwarranted influence
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American Historians
over the research agendas of historians. Resentful professors have been asked to tell irbs who they want to interview and why. Assistant professors who have not asked for prior permission have been told they cannot publish articles on which they have worked for years. Graduate students have been told to alter the questions they want to ask. In an illustration of the treacherous slippery slope, irbs—claiming “information risk”—have suggested that archivists require researchers who want to access transcripts of interviews and data sets to acquire irb clearance first. When the possibility of changing this situation emerged over the summer months, your OAH Executive Board unanimously voted to take a position and make its voice heard. In consultation with the leadership of the American Historical Association and other historical organizations, we drafted a statement that will, we hope, help put an end to the runaway rule of the irb over historical research. Our statement, which you can access on the World Wide Web at http:// www.oah.org/about/papers/press_releases/ argues that the “common rule” does not and should not apply to historians who engage in idiosyncratic, nonsystematic research. So why should you vote in this year’s OAH election? Because next year, your elected board will be called upon to take another equally important step. If you want to be sure that you will have an active and engaged executive board to represent your interests, look for your ballot and vote when it arrives. ■ Alice Kessler-Harris is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History at Columbia University.
2012 OAH/NCPH Annual Meeting American Historians
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