Want to contemplate a new possibility for academic mischief ? Attend the

blog of Brooklyn College Professor Mitchell Langbert on the Democracy Project’s website.

Langbert, now investigating the subject further, describes an

intellectually sinister reinterpretation of Department

of Health and Human Services regulations designed to protect human subjects

against abuse by federally funded researchers. Primarily conceived with

medical research in mind, the DHHS protocols also cover the social

sciences. And–wouldn’t you guess it?–some of the scholars interpreting

the regs are finding ways to employ them in the cause of correct thought.

One means is charging the university committees that look out for abuse to

consider the harm research might cause “third parties”, that is to say,

individuals and groups having nothing to do with it. For example, a

committee might bar research if, in its judgment, the findings could have a

harmful impact on some favored interest. Langbert queried a reigning

authority in this area as to whether a committee could, hypothetically,

block the research of Thomas Sowell on the grounds that it might result in

reduced minority admissions to elite colleges. Replied the professor, the

co-author of a manual for the training of human-subject committees, “there

is a risk and it needs to be evaluated in the context of overall benefits

and study design.”