Comment by klodolph
4 years ago
Someone made a good case that the IRB may have just been doing their job, according to their guidelines for what is exempt from review & what is "research on human subjects".
Nevertheless it is clear that UMN does not have sufficient controls in place to prevent this kind of unethical behavior. The ban & patch reversions may force the issue.
Individual groups at unis are very independent, little oversight is common.
UMN CS associate department head on this: https://twitter.com/lorenterveen/status/1384965111014641667 (TL;DR: they didn't hear about this before because each group does its thing, leadership doesn't get involved in IRB process, in his opinion IRB failed - situation analogous to cases known to be problematic in other subfields https://twitter.com/lorenterveen/status/1384955467051454466 )