Creative Nonfiction and the Academy: A Cautionary Tale

Since their inception, institutional review boards (IRBs), which use a biomedical model with which to evaluate cases, have continued to extend their reach, increasingly of late into the humanities. Although most humanists in the academy are probably not even aware of its existence, their local IRB could step in and demand that a writer' s project, it if involves the broadly defined human-subject research, be vetted through the board before approval be granted to proceed. Should the IRB determine that a writer has breached IRB protocol, the board has the authority to do what it will with the work, including attempting to stop its publication. Before such institutionalized oversight is allowed to continue to expand, much more work has to be done to assure that the process can be justly and rightly applied to the range of fields IRBs aspire to regulate.