Eh. I was a tenured professor who recently left my position because I got tired of the mind-numbing cacophany that academics has become.

However...

I think people may be reading into this too much, and overlooking the more obvious problem this points to, which is the typical IRB system in a university setting. The real scandal here is probably not anything about grievance studies or its pushback, but how it's even possible that the IRB can function in this way. Because, as someone who has seen all sorts of IRB investigations and feedback and discussions, this to me looks more like typical IRB behavior than anything about grievance study politics.

To me this looks like a simple case where the IRB saw something about this study and decided that it was unreviewed human subjects study, and that as such, the investigator should be investigated. I've seen stuff like this before, and it has nothing to do with broader university politics, it's everything about Kafkaesque IRBs that now oversee every nanometer of university research.

People seem to assume that IRBs are rational, and that the only reason this could be occurring is because the IRB is being leveraged to punish this professor for politically unpopular views. This could be possible, but to me this action is totally expectable given the IRBs I've seen. They're mindless, bureaucratic institutions that approach everything from a robotic literal interpretation of every guideline, with little to no regard for actual scientific ethics per se.

IRB approval is a standard requirement for any research done when interacting with human test subjects. The researchers unquestionably didn't apply for IRB approval, and hence they're under scrutiny. No need to dream up conspiracy theories.

Yep. AFAIK you have to get IRB approval to do literally anything with humans involved. Zero discretion is permitted because any amount of discretion degrades trust in the system (and if you thought anti-intellectualism was bad these days, boy do I have a dystopia for you to imagine) and allows unacceptable failures to creep in purely due to human error.

How many times have you submitted a small PR that obviously can't break anything, complaining about the annoyance all the time, only to find out that your "obviously right" PR was in fact badly wrong? How many times have you seen some bit of code and thought "this is weird, but it had to have been approved to get merged, so I probably don't have to worry too much about it"? Now multiply that by research with human subjects.

Incredibly good reasons for extensive review of human research can be found here, for the skeptical or curious: https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/resources/bioethics/timel...

Another more recent one: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthday/Story?id=4741269&pag...

More examples aren't hard to find at all, including the case last year of the gene-edited girls: https://gizmodo.com/chinese-scientist-who-created-crispr-bab...

When you've got a burning question in mind and visions of tremendous benefits for all humanity (or saving some academic fields from themselves) it seems like a good idea to get your ideas reviewed.

Ish.

Research in the educational setting involving routine educational activities is exempt from most IRB requirements, except for an initial review to confirm that it is the above.

BTW you need IRB review for animal studies as well.

It's typically pretty easy to get too -- you can shop around for a sympathetic IRB. In my experience it's been basically a rubber stamp.

Note I work in industry not academia.

There are exceptions to IRB and while I couldn't necessarily shoehorn this case into any one of them, there is an argument to be made that this counts as a form of "performance evaluation" where obviously no consent could be given beforehand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board#Exc...

What about performance art?

It's always struck me as odd that American universities' standards for these things are so much stricter than American businesses' standards.

After all, every A/B test, every gradual rollout of software features, and every measurement of a user's response to an ad is an experiment with a human test subject.

I wonder why the standards imposed on universities are so much more demanding than the standards imposed on businesses?

Universities hold themselves to a higher standard because they operate (or at least want to maintain the pretense of operating) for the benefit of the world, while businesses only care about benefiting their shareholders.

The IRB requirement is not self-imposed by universities holding themselves to a higher standard. It's a federal regulation which is imposed on them.

Science is about doing it right, business is about doing just enough to get the job done.

For medical research, sure. He submitted fake articles to publications, he didn't perform medical experiments on the reviewers.

> For medical research, sure.

Behavioral research too (which this certainly is). Anything involving humans, pretty much.

What about journalists? Should they go through IRB approval before publishing a story?

If they're in the journalism department of a university, they'll be required to get consent for all studies on human subjects they do.

For a student project, I once did a user study with a purely informational app. I needed to get approval and have each participant sign a form that I had adequately informed them about the possible dangers of the experiment (none) and that their data would remain confidential and so on.

The effort seems ridiculous when it's obvious that there's no danger, but the whole point of having a review process is to make sure that someone checks.

Are they performing research that receives support, directly or indirectly, from the United States federal government?

If not, the answer is no, though you can read the federal regulations yourself to prove me wrong:

https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=&SID=83cd09e1c0...

The "grievance studies" papers were sponsored by the federal government?

Indirectly? Yes.

Boghossian is an employee of Portland State, an institution which almost certainly receives grant funding from the federal government for research. Some minute portion of his salary/office/supplies/etc. are paid for by said federal research grant money.

Regardless, the regulations apply to the entire institution and therefore any faculty members of said institution.

That's been proposed. What's the point of this question?

Was this research, though? Or was this goofing around? Was their goal to publish a paper about what they'd done? If so, it's research. But if not, this is not research. Academics aren't required to get board approval for every human interaction they have.

From my other comment:

As the author stated, the goal was to:

> "to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research"

"study" being the operative word, there.

By this logic performance art done in view of humans should be subject to IRB review — it is, after all, trying to provoke and observe a reaction in a group of humans.

If people get tickets to see your art they aren't really being experimented on.

If you want to, say, explode a simulated bomb in a TSA screening area to call attention to the waste of lives inherent in the checkpoints...yes, you'd need an IRB sign off, but probably that would be the least of your problems.

If the performance art:

1) Qualifies as research, and

2) Is directly or indirectly funded by a federal research grant

then yes, it would.

I doubt much performance art qualifies, though.

You haven't looked much into the grievance studies area much then. The whole field is a gangrenous foot that will kill academia if something is not done about it.

How will it kill academia? Will it suck up all the funding, starving other fields? If not, what damage can it do, any more than, say, topology could kill classics?

This is a serious question, not a sarcastic one. Is this study area somehow affecting other academic disciplines? I'm long out of academia so this is all invisible to me.

The concern, as I have often heard it repeated, is that by being so capricious, unbearable and aggressive, the personality type associated with "grievance studies" will ruin any social goodwill held towards academics, along with their reputation for being more right than the average person. If that were to happen, nobody would want to send their kids, tax money, or endowment fund donations to any universities, and the whole system would go away.

I actually don't think this is a new phenomenon, but an old one with evolving names and players. When I was a student 3+ decades ago, we called them "fluff courses." And my parents remember taking fluff courses too.

We may have rolled our eyes, but in reality we were in on the game and had a vested interest in it, because the fluff courses were known to be an easy A. For one thing, a course that everybody in the college had to take, everybody had to pass. For another, teachers with a strong ideological agenda tended to be easy graders, because they wanted to be liked. So we sucked it up in those courses and were thankful for the boost to our GPA's.

If you make every subject as rigorous as math or physics, the resulting workload will be crushing. And not everybody who gets a degree needs to be such a rigorous thinker, to make a valuable contribution to society.

>If you make every subject as rigorous as math or physics, the resulting workload will be crushing. And not everybody who gets a degree needs to be such a rigorous thinker, to make a valuable contribution to society.

You could have a course that was neither rigorous nor ideologically biased, in fact every department could have them. I dream of an alternate universe (which one day could be ours) where instead of "You get an A but you have to pretend to agree with the professor 101," we could have, "the X department runs through their favorite material, but skips all of the really tedious parts that you would have to learn if you wanted to contribute, but as a spectator could go without."

A lot of colleges have an option to "audit" a course. My own experience was that in spectator mode, I didn't really learn anything, because courses had a "learn by doing" aspect that was pretty valuable for me. Also, courses I was taking for a grade always got priority for study time.

At Drexel, they had “physics for designers”, which is roughly what you describe.

>The concern, as I have often heard it repeated, is that by being so capricious, unbearable and aggressive, the personality type associated with "grievance studies" will ruin any social goodwill held towards academics, along with their reputation for being more right than the average person.

This was William Buckley's theory in God and Man at Yale. Has the gangrene managed to advance since the 1940s without ever killing the patient?

Political support of universities is decreasing due to it, Pew has studied it.

That is quite interesting, and thanks for referencing Pew. The closest I could find was the one below [1] that says that Republican support for universities in the US is declining, and that the reasons were (in order) cost, "professors bringing their political and social views into the classroom" and "too much concern about protecting students from views they might find offensive" (the latter being closest). However study [2] suggests the difference might be more nuanced.

Also, (though I am not in academia, my gf is and I spend a lot of time on campus): I'm not sure how much is really being "shut down" via complaints from so-called "grievance studies" faculty. The few cases that make the news seem so cause célèbre that I feel their very rarity is what makes them newsworthy. But then again I'm not a close observer.

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/26/most-america...

[2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/20/republicans-...

Interesting that the belief the professors are bringing their ideology into the classroom just shoots up as Republicans get older. Are they remembering their time in college? Maybe it was a bigger real thing in the 70s...

I think it largely has to do with decades of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as news. Listen to Rush Limbaugh every day for a few years, and you start to believe him.

Some older people become isolated from real-world social groups and get sucked into worrying about whatever radio or facebook feeds them. Which these days includes a lot of scary stories about universities coddling the next generation.

These graphs all turn markedly during/after the 2016 election, when political discussion and dueling tribalist/ideological messaging has dominated media, a great deal of money and effort has gone into targeting online communities, etc.

It won’t kill academia but it may eventually lead to a large cut in academic funding or a determined effort to make a degree unnecessary for respectable middle class careers or both. Gender/Queer/Ethnic studies, cultural anthropology and sociology are overwhelmingly left wing. They are a branch of the academy and at the same time a sinecure for people who produce ideas useful to one side of the culture war. There’s no right wing equivalent, no department that is over 90% conservative where politics trumps the search for truth. And this isn’t something these people are trying to hide. They’re quite open about the primacy of their political mission. And the students who major on these subjects don’t learn any particularly useful skills. Eventually some Republican will run on turning state colleges into STEM, education and business places and gutting the humanities and social sciences. Once it happens one place it’ll be repeated. If half of the population sees universities as hostile to their beliefs and life why should they vote to continue funding them?

https://newrepublic.com/article/143844/liberals-cant-ignore-...

> A Pew Research poll released this week found that 58 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents believe higher education has “a negative effect on the way things are going in the country,” versus just 19 percent of those on the left who say the same. While opinion on the left has remained fairly steady, on the right it has become decidedly more pessimistic over the past two years (in the accompanying graph, note the drastic shift after the poll taken in September 2015).

> a determined effort to make a degree unnecessary for respectable middle class careers

This would be welcome, frankly. There are so many careers for which a degree requirement is a gatekeeper, nothing else. Hell, many jobs advertise a requirement for any degree, with no particular preference, which tells you exactly how pertinent the content of the degree is to the job.

As a society we've hyper-focussed on the desirability of university degrees at the expense of every other type of learning or training, and at immense cost. I'd welcome an honest re-appraisal of our priorities and an end to the creeping domination of credentialism.

>If half of the population sees universities as hostile to their beliefs and life why should they vote to continue funding them?

Because it's the academically educated professionals (and upwards in income) who are actually paying most of the taxes?

That’s true but it’s not necessarily true. It’s easy enough to conceive of alternative ways of structuring education, and especially job training. MBAs and JDs are both of astonishingly little value compared to their cost except insofar as they enable you to get certain kinds of jobs that would be impossible or very difficult otherwise. Law schools are quite adamant that they’re not trade schools. We have an existence proof of trade schools of some kinds being sufficient to substitute for a Bachelor’s in at least one area too. Lambda School is teaching people to be web developers in well under a year. I’m sure there are other well paid jobs they or someone like them could do the same in. College isn’t necessary for work training and there are large parts where it’s currentky necessary if you want a job but it needn’t be.

Technically, they have a valid point. This was an experiment on human subjects without their consent.

I think this observation raises a further discussion about the gatekeeping, chilling effect of ethics boards. Scott Alexander describes his kafkaesque experience with them here:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/

It was an experiment on institutions.

> It was an experiment on institutions

And as they're so keen to remind us, groups have rights. Which should also mean they have responsibilities.

The IRB should not be capable of learning about research conducted on them which amounts to a survey, before said research can commence. It produces an effective tyranny, where the only people who can validate the work of the affiliated institution are at the same time prohibited from doing so.

In my humble opinion, I think the IRB process is backwards: researchers should determine whether their methodology is ethical (or within whatever other institutional regulations), and be tried only after a report is received, or an investigation is started. Not approaching the IRB alone should not be an offense.

> I think the IRB process is backwards: researchers should determine whether their methodology is ethical (or within whatever other institutional regulations), and be tried only after a report is received, or an investigation is started

Err, I don't think that would work as well as you think. Plenty of studies fall into gray areas, especially in behavioral research, and it's not necessarily easy to reverse the damage once it's done.

The "Little Albert" study could very easily be argued as "ethical" or at least not harmful (almost certainly the behavior became extinct over time) by the researcher, but nonetheless the potential for lifelong harm is there and it would likely never be approved today.

Sometimes once you've done the damage, it's done. Research institutions would rather be safe than sorry with studies involving people, both for basic ethical considerations and reputation interests. Especially after the spat of very questionable studies done in the latter half of the 20th century.

> The "Little Albert" study could very easily be argued as "ethical" or at least not harmful (almost certainly the behavior became extinct over time) by the researcher, but nonetheless the potential for lifelong harm is there and it would likely never be approved today.

Sure, but those lessons are already learned. It's not like research ethics was materialized out of thin air by institutional review boards: it was synthesized from experience, and then executed by the boards. The ethics are the same whether the assessment is before or after the fact, and nothing stops researchers from consulting the board or anyone else on the topic beforehand, if they are concerned they may run afoul.

I think it's silly to think that an IRB has a better grasp before the fact of how ethical or appropriate a methodology is than the researchers do during the research. In this case, the IRB is being used as a bludgeon to suppress low-risk research which is simply politically inconvenient to the institution.

  and be tried only after a report is received, or
  an investigation is started

At that point it's too late to save the victims. Obviously unacceptable, right?

(edit: got two posts backwards, sorry, fixed.)

Presumption of innocence is a foundation of law, at least in the United States.

So yes, waiting until there is a victim to start a trial is a reasonable approach to scientific ethics. It may not be the best one, but it’s surely justifiable.

The majority of industries which involve the potential to cause harm operate with comparable licensing and oversight systems. Food manufacturing, aerospace engineering, civil engineering, factories with dangerous equipment like smelters or refineries, all of these strictly require licensed professionals to do design work, that plans be approved by various oversight bodies before operation commences, and in some cases that those oversight bodies conduct regular inspections. We mandate this oversight because, without it, people do horrible things and get away with it. They hide their crimes too well, they have pockets deep enough to win any court case, or they foist the blame off on someone else. So we prevent harm instead of trusting people and corporations to be good when we know they won't be. https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/resources/bioethics/timel...

> all of these strictly require licensed professionals to do design work

Sure, but it's not clear that the licensure itself reduces accidents or abuse. Plenty of licensed electricians (at least here in Ontario) are deadly incompetent. I've heard at least two accounts of electricians assuring builders or homeowners that a circuit is disconnected, and those people having an unwelcome surprise when they go to cut/remove said circuit.

All of these things come with a cost as well as a benefit.

It is possible to deal with crime through an 'oversight system', this is called a surveillance state.

As I indicated, I'm uncommitted on which way is best for the case under discussion. For criminal matters, and for hairdressing, I prefer presumption of innocence; for aerospace engineering, licensure and oversight.

I think it is a justifiable approach and might be a better one. We chose IRBs after appalling cases like the Tuskegee Airmen experiment; perhaps we should have hanged the perpetrators instead.

Perhaps not. Having never been an academic, I am aware this subject invokes strong feelings, while having none myself.

The Tuskgee syphilis experiment resulted also in informed consent laws in clinical trials; which I would argue would have a better effect than trying to get a board within the institution which carried out this experiment to apply an ethical standard to the study.

Only criminal law and there's no reason to think that standard should be applied in all situations beyond criminal law. The criminal standard is so high because the consequence of guilt is so high (including incarceration or even death) and because it's applied by the State.

Should the consequences of harming test subjects be any lower?

I can make a solid case for a less oppressive IRB regime and criminal sanctions for those who harm their test subjects.

Prior restraint in the form of requiring approval by an IRB is better than harsher punishment. The point is to prevent any research from getting to the point of criminal charges.

A researcher operating under "better to ask forgiveness than permission" is in serious mad scientist, Frankenstein territory.

I don't know how familiar you are with research in the social sciences, but as wgerard's comment observes, this isn't a trumped-up charge.

They could have done this without claiming that it was part of their university-affiliated research, and thus not fallen foul of ethical guidelines. But they published an official academic paper describing the stunt (afterwards) and claimed that it was a legitimate research project. They can't have it both ways: either it's a rogue hoax carried out outside of their day job, or it has to comply with the rules, which aren't onerous, but do require certain ethical standards to be met.

The hell are you talking about, none of the cliamed in any way that this was an academic research affiliated with any university, only one of them is affiliated with one. In their quillete article they even talk about how this is not an academic study, but rather a hoax like the Sokal hoax before it

Here's the situation as described in a good and fairly neutral (I think!) nymag article:

"Crucially, it does not matter that the hoaxsters didn’t attempt to publish their final results in a peer-reviewed journal. “Publishing in a magazine that’s not peer reviewed doesn’t matter if they’re reporting on their research,” said Celia Fisher, director of the Fordham University Center for Ethics Education. All that matters is that Boghossian is an employee at PSU, and that he conducted what the university deemed to be human-subjects research based on a plain reading of how that term is normally defined for this purpose."

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/is-peter-boghossian-g...

So it appears that Boghossian's academic affiliation is something he can't just leave at work; i.e. it seems that it was unsafe to go public with his involvement in the hoax. The Areo article makes it sound like the hoaxers thought they were doing the right thing by dropping their anonymity:

"This generated further attention that eventually got the Wall Street Journal involved, and far more importantly, it changed the ethics of utilizing deception within the project. With major journalistic outlets and (by then) two journals asking us to prove our authors’ identities, the ethics had shifted away from a defensible necessity of investigation and into outright lying. We did not feel right about this and decided the time had come to go public with the project. As a result, we came clean to the Wall Street Journal at the beginning of August and began preparing a summary as quickly as possible even though we still had several papers progressing encouragingly through the review process."

https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...

They thought this move would make it OK to complete their research project in good faith (without submitting any further hoax articles). But it wouldn't be the first time somebody thought they were off the hook, when in fact they were still exposed to accusations of ethical wrongdoing.

> Publishing in a magazine that’s not peer reviewed doesn’t matter if they’re reporting on their research

This framing should tell you the bad faith in which the statement is being made. The authors didn't call it a research, critics rightly pointed out that it wasn't an academic research when they first revealed the hoax, and that nobody should take it seriously. Now that it is convenient to attack them by saying otherwise, now all of the sudden it is an academic research

The Areo article starts with "This essay, although hopefully accessible to everyone, is the most thorough breakdown of the study".

Those words "the study" clearly seek to frame the hoax as part of a research project or "study".

I like the expert opinion quoted in the NY Magazine article that basically says, "yes, this disciplinary action is politically motivated, but it's also entirely legitimate".

It seems like that is often the way the world works—there are many more possible, legitimate, prosecutions than are actually pursued. The choice of which to pursue can be made in unfair ways. Often it is used to reinforce corrupt systems.

In this case, there isn't any visible corruption. Nobody entrapped Boghossian, nobody appears to have had it in for him in advance. He walked into this.

The rules are not being applied out of a sense of ethical obligation, but rather to punish Boghossian for his views and for causing offense to other academics.

If he had done this outside of his university-affiliated research I bet the university would be investigating him anyway.

I bet the university and the academics he offended would also claim that nothing he publishes happens "outside" his university affiliation because everybody knows he is a professor there, he represents the university, he published articles in academic journals whose editors believed he was doing academic stuff, and so on.

> The rules are not being applied out of a sense of ethical obligation, but rather to punish Boghossian for his views and for causing offense to other academics.

This seems like a bit of a leap. What evidence is there for this being the case?

Are university professors prohibited from submitting official academic papers outside of their university life? If so that sounds like a violation of the first amendment (when talking about state schools anyways).

If not, what made this part of their university life?

> If not, what made this part of their university life?

The fact that he likely included his academic affiliation on any papers he wrote, likely used university resources to conduct or discuss some part of the research (e.g. meeting rooms, his office, his office phone), is an employee of the university, etc.

I mean, come on - no IRB is going to let you claim a technicality like that. If you could skirt around research regulations by just claiming you were doing it "on your own" with no affiliation to the university, the IRB would be effectively pointless.

But they used pseudonyms, right? He didn't say "I'm Peter Boghossian with PSU".

Anyway, what's shocking to me coming from Physics is how hard it is to read these papers from outside of academia (no arXiv even to at least see pre-prints). So I'm already more sympathetic to the hoaxers.

Yep, it's creepy, Kafka-esque.

McLellan and cohorts are saying they're not allowed to be mock ed.

It was really the journals themselves who were the test subjects, not any specific named individuals. A journal is an institution, not a person.

And you surely couldn't trust administrators at Portland State to not give a secret warning to a publication when they're all part of the same scam.

Collaborate with a second lab at another institute. Get approval from one IRB to run the study against the other. Problem solved, everything aboveboard.

> Collaborate with a second lab at another institute. Get approval from one IRB to run the study against the other. Problem solved, everything aboveboard.

He would still get investigated for this. The university might need to find another reason, but they would certainly try.