Like many schools of public policy and management, New York University's Wagner School offers a capstone course in which teams of MPA students provide consultation to client organizations. This year, as we began to assign students to teams, some members of the faculty sounded an alarm. Several of the projects might involve interviewing service recipients about sensitive issues. Other projects would give teams access to confidential information. Faculty members experienced with our university human subjects review board knew that such projects, were they to be undertaken in a research context, would require lengthy and cumbersome review.Did the capstone projects need to go through the human subjects review process? If the answer was yes, our program would come to a grinding halt, given the openendedness of the capstone assignments and the bureaucratic nature of the committee application and approval process.As Wagner's incoming representative to the university's human subjects review board-commonly known as the Institutional Review Board, or IRB-I had a particular interest in the matter. My sense was that the alarm was probably unnecessary. The IRB, after all, had never approached us about our capstone activities, and there had been plenty of outreach from them with respect to reviewing our funded research projects. The notion of an outside board's overseeing professional education seemed intrusive and unnecessary. The question, however, had been raised. I knew that the human subjects review board was constituted under federal regulation, and was subject to penalties and sanctions. Since I would soon join the board, I needed to know more.
