A few months ago a magazine editor sent me proofs of some upcoming higher education books, to see if I’d be interested in writing a review. One was title Wannabe U, by University of Connecticut sociologist Gaye Tuchman. That sparked my interest–my father was once a professor at UConn and I lived in Storrs until I was thirteen. But when I started leafing through the pages, the book immediately struck me as…odd. It purports to be the study of an un-named university’s quest for status. All the characters have pseudonyms and the author says some of the details of their jobs have been changed. But the university in question is obviously the University of Connecticut.
For example, on page 14, the book quotes President “Whitmore” as saying, at his inauguration, “Nothing is more important to the quality of life in this state than educational excellence.” If you Google that phrase, exactly as written, in quotes, you get only two hits. One is from Wannabe U. The other is from the actual inaugural speech of former University of Connecticut President Philip E. Austin.
Yet as Scott Jaschik writes at InsideHigherEd, Tuchman continues to refuse to confirm the identity of the university she wrote about. This strikes me as problematic and a little bizarre. Allegedly, it’s of function of restrictions mandated by the UConn IR board. I’ve never interacted with an IR board but I know plenty of people who have and some of their stories beggar belief. And even if you grant that they were trying to protect the interests of human subjects, I’m not sure how that’s accomplished here. If an author writes a straightforward non-fiction account of real people, then they’re ethically bound by all kinds of bright line standards: you can’t quote people saying things they didn’t actually say, you can’t describe them doing things they didn’t actually do.
But once you cross the line into fictionalization, you introduce all kinds of ambiguity and uncertainty without actually protecting the people in question. As a reader, I can confirm that president Austin actually said the Googled words above because his inaugural speech happens to be on the Internet. But I have no way of knowing if all the other words and actions attributable to “President Whitmore” are fairly attributable to Austin, even though the books clearly implies that they are.
More broadly, the whole exercise of denying an obvious truth is fundamentally disrespectful to readers and counter to scholarly values. It’s all pretty strange.
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It’s not that hard to figure out a lot of the locations that IRB’s want researchers to veil. Imagine reading a Harvard grad student’s dissertation on “a large Northeastern city” or something to that effect — it doesn’t exactly take Sherlock Holmes to figure out which city it was.
My feeling is that there are far too many cities, districts, etc. that are given pseudonyms in academic research for no good reason. I honestly don’t know if this is overkill from the IRB’s or if researchers just overdo it in an attempt to reduce the number of IRB problems they encounter.
As someone trained in a history department, I’ve always the social-science convention of masking identities a little odd, and the people who can truly tell Kafkaesque horror stories of IRBs are the oral historians met with the response, “No, you can’t interview public figures like former governors and tell everyone who was responding.”
On the other hand, some blame might go to Tuchman for not taking significant efforts to mask identities. It’s not that difficult, even if you’re discussing institutional contexts. There is a cost: you have to omit enough details that you may lose the sense of verisimilitude that comes with concrete information. But that’s the bargain with this. Some authors are successful (such as Shirley Brice Heath in her famous Ways with Words).