November 06, 2007
By Robert B. Townsend
The federal government is inviting comments (at http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/documents/20071026.htm)
on policies that lead to the intrusion of institutional review boards
(IRBs) into oral history research. This provides a rare opportunity for
members of our profession to register their objections. I urge every
historian who conducts oral history, or is responsible for students who
use oral history methods, to respond to this request and express their
concerns about the inappropriate and often arbitrary way this policy
has been applied to history research in many colleges and universities.
You have until December 26, 2007 (send comments to the mailing and
email addresses listed at the end of this post).
For those who
do not follow this issue, IRBs were set up at universities and research
centers to protect “human subjects” (living people) from dangerous
medical and psychological experiments. Unfortunately, the federal
government’s rather vague policies joined with university
administrators’ instinct to avoid potential liability, caught up
practices in a number of other social science and humanities
fields—including oral history research in our discipline. As a result,
we receive regular complaints that the degrees of history doctoral
students have been withheld, the research of some faculty have been put
on hold, and history teachers and students have been threatened with
substantial fines, just for talking to people about past experiences.
Over the past seven years, the AHA made a number of efforts to clarify or reverse this policy
of using IRBs to regulate oral history, first by working with the
federal Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP) to clarify their
policy, and then by encouraging departments to engage the IRBs at their
home institutions to clarify these policies. Despite all these efforts,
an AHA staff survey last year found a patchwork of institutional policies that belie the notion that this is a federally-mandated policy.