Timothy Burke talks sense about Institutional Review Boards and federal oversight thereof, at least as applied to the humanities and social sciences.

Incidentally, many IRBs (including those at SLU and Duke) have asserted that the use of secondary data on human subjects is also subject to their oversight, even if completely anonymized as is the case of the American National Election Studies and General Social Survey. Apparently this requirement exists just in case junior faculty members on the tenure clock didn’t have enough useless paperwork to fill out… or maybe it’s just bureaucratic turf-building by non-academics who wouldn’t recognize social scientific research if it snuck up behind them and interviewed them for six hours.