Sometimes professors face jail time for their research because there are no laws protecting academic researchers who keep their sources confidential.
It is well known that many journalists have been imprisoned for refusing to reveal information about controversial sources.
Judith Miller of The New York Times was recently sentenced to jail time for refusing to reveal the identity of sources to Justice Department investigators.
University professors could be at risk for similar situations.
Rik Scarce, an assistant professor of Sociology at Montana State University, was jailed in 1993 for refusing to reveal information to federal investigators about environmental extremist groups that he was studying.
The issue has not yet been a problem for U professors, but the possibility of a U professor being forced to turn over a confidential source is always present.
“There’s absolutely a concern. Department members really do worry about this. It’s not just hypothetical,” said Leslie Francis, chairwoman of the philosophy department and a professor of law.
Unlike journalists, academic researchers don’t have a newspaper to make public their arrests and detentions for keeping a secret in the pursuit of truth.
“This is an undeveloped area of law. There aren’t well-established privileges,” General Counsel for the U John Morris said.
Some types of academic studies, such as medical research, do have legal confidentiality protection; however, other areas, such as the social sciences, do not.
“There is no researcher-subject privilege,” Francis said. “The federal regulations governing research with human subjects, under which the University of Utah operates, do not require that confidentiality be protected.”
Luckily for researchers, the challenging of academic confidentiality has not been a common practice.
“I’m not aware of any cases in Utah dealing with this issue,” Morris said.
“We have not had any attempt I’m aware of to coerce a faculty member to disclose information.”
Nevertheless, the lack of clear legal protection is disconcerting to some faculty members.
“We’re a litigious society, and the pattern has become more dangerous for researchers,” Theresa Martinez, associate professor of sociology, said.
Martinez said it is highly unlikely that investigators would be interested in her research area.
However, if faced with a subpoena, Martinez said she would be willing to face jail time to protect the confidentiality of her sources.
“In my research, I can’t imagine a scenario in which I would give my respondent up,” she said.
Fear of legal investigation has the potential to make some researchers overly cautious and limit the types of studies conducted.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if there has been some research that has been chilled,” Francis said.
Members of the U administration said they would likely support any faculty members who had the confidentiality of their research challenged.
“We want to guard free inquiry, and we want to do it an appropriate way, protecting subject and interviewer,” John Francis, acting senior vice president of academic affairs, said.
“The university values and protects the academic freedom of individual faculty members,” Morris said.