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A longish response: I think perhaps the key point here is that faculty at a university are in many ways "their own bosses". Faculty don't ask their department heads (or senior colleagues) for 'permission' to do any research...
and typically most people in any department are unaware of the details of what their colleagues are doing. In the US, the right way to vet the ethics of ones' research is through your University's IRB. Again, one's dept. head and colleagues are not involved in this process at all
To get more specific: CS department leadership didn't know about the back and forth or publicity about this work in December. I would say this is not unusual, although it clearly is unfortunate, and let's say that this is a learning experience for us. One more point to come:....
Yes! This was an IRB 'failure'. Again, in my area of Social Computing, it's been clear for awhile that IRBs often do not understand the issues and the potential risks/harms of doing research in online communities / social media. So researchers have to exercise their own care....
I would argue that the IRB, as a legal requirement, should be considered a minimum rather than a gold standard by the people in the broader research community who judge the work. By that I mean program committees, not colleagues.
This is an important point. This has been the topic of intense discussion in the ACM SIGCHI community for a number of years. Should PCs 'override' standard ethical reviews? Under what circumstances? There are strong opinions on this! @asbruckman might have thoughts...
Note that Prof. Lu claimed that this was not human experimentation, and didn't get IRB approval up front. After the fact, he got an IRB excemption claiming it wasn't "human experimentation".
Whether or not it's "human experimentation" via some kind of technicality, it's the lack of institutional controls at UMN for this kind of activity --- which is hopefully obviously ethically dubious --- which in my mind is what justifies the university-wide ban.
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