Recently, one of the departments on my campus invited an academic “expert,” who, among other specializations, “advise[s] on the ethical aspects of telescope siting,” to give a talk entitled “How Research Harms.”
The advertisements for the event summarized the speaker’s perspective with the declaration, “We ought to be restricting research based on a number of unique and underacknowledged harms … [which] are poorly understood and lack clear definitions.” Prominent among these “harms” are unspecified “psychological, social and moral hazards.”
This is but one example of a growing phenomenon in higher education. The perspective in question—that some sizable quantity of scientific research is causing undefined harms and must therefore be prevented on ethical grounds—has become widespread. It marks a significant departure from an earlier academic culture that celebrated the open-ended pursuit of truth as the fundamental value of higher education.
The creation of the IRB system marked the first stage of the effort to exert overarching ethical control over scientific and academic inquiry.