Oral history regulation
I don't usually read the publication "Perspectives" from the American Historical Association, on account of it's about the history profession and I'm not a professional historian. But I did today.
There were a couple of items about the regulation of Oral History. Oral History and Review Boards: Little Gain and More Pain and An IRB at Work: A Personal Experience
Oral history has got caught up in the regulations designed to protect human subjects from abuse in medical and scientific research. Even though the federal Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) seems to take the position that oral history should be exluded from its concerns, most university Institutional Research Boards haven't accepted that as an exception.
I'm not going to recap the entire issue here. The article itself is very informative. But one thing that's missing is a sense of the irony of the situation.
Not all historians are leftliberals, but it's safe to say that the academic community is more leftliberal than not.
One of the things that's frustrating about discussions of government regulation is that those on the left will bleat "regulation good, deregulation bad, regulation good, deregulation bad" while those on the right will bleat just the opposite. They don't get into discussions of what METHODS of regulation can work while minimizing abuses, and which kinds don't.
One of the things about regulatory agencies is that they tend to become self-perpetuating institutions that are a law unto themselves. If they are run by reasonable people who don't see the need to do more regulating than absolutely necessary, their reason for existence is diminished, and their budgets perhaps get cut. So they tend to become more intrusive and arbitrary than originally intended, and you end up with ridiculous regulations made to apply to people that obviously don't need the heavy hand of regulation.
That seems to be what has happened here. IRBs aren't about to diminish their own roles by saying oral history doesn't come under their own jurisdiction. And they tend to assume that their subjects are guilty until proven innocent. So historians have to, at best, expend a lot of energy that could better be spent elsewhere trying to reason with these people and negotiate with them.
It will be interesting when the scope of the regulations expands, and K-12 school teachers find it's no longer worth the regulatory trouble to have their kids do a social studies assignment that involves interviewing their grandparents' generation about the old days. But until the law catches up with them, maybe that's the only place any real oral history will get done any more.
Cross-posted to liberal
There were a couple of items about the regulation of Oral History. Oral History and Review Boards: Little Gain and More Pain and An IRB at Work: A Personal Experience
Oral history has got caught up in the regulations designed to protect human subjects from abuse in medical and scientific research. Even though the federal Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) seems to take the position that oral history should be exluded from its concerns, most university Institutional Research Boards haven't accepted that as an exception.
I'm not going to recap the entire issue here. The article itself is very informative. But one thing that's missing is a sense of the irony of the situation.
Not all historians are leftliberals, but it's safe to say that the academic community is more leftliberal than not.
One of the things that's frustrating about discussions of government regulation is that those on the left will bleat "regulation good, deregulation bad, regulation good, deregulation bad" while those on the right will bleat just the opposite. They don't get into discussions of what METHODS of regulation can work while minimizing abuses, and which kinds don't.
One of the things about regulatory agencies is that they tend to become self-perpetuating institutions that are a law unto themselves. If they are run by reasonable people who don't see the need to do more regulating than absolutely necessary, their reason for existence is diminished, and their budgets perhaps get cut. So they tend to become more intrusive and arbitrary than originally intended, and you end up with ridiculous regulations made to apply to people that obviously don't need the heavy hand of regulation.
That seems to be what has happened here. IRBs aren't about to diminish their own roles by saying oral history doesn't come under their own jurisdiction. And they tend to assume that their subjects are guilty until proven innocent. So historians have to, at best, expend a lot of energy that could better be spent elsewhere trying to reason with these people and negotiate with them.
It will be interesting when the scope of the regulations expands, and K-12 school teachers find it's no longer worth the regulatory trouble to have their kids do a social studies assignment that involves interviewing their grandparents' generation about the old days. But until the law catches up with them, maybe that's the only place any real oral history will get done any more.
Cross-posted to liberal