Nate and Lee, I am so sorry to hear you have gone through this experience. This is clearly misuse of the IRB system to engage in harassment. There are some clear steps that should be taken at the institutional and FEDERAL level to address this problem.
1. No anonymous complaints of any kind should be permitted related to IRB issues. As such, any complaint was must attached with the identity, affiliation and contact information of the party making the complaint. Refusal to provide this information should be grounds to dismiss the complaint with prejudice WHILE also informing the accused of the nature of the dismissed complaint AND the identity of the complainant.
2. Any complaint found not to be based on merit should not only be dismissed with prejudice, but the complainant should be barred permanently from filing any complaints of any kind with ANY IRB nationally in perpetuity. This would be enforced via creating a public facing database revealing the identity of all such complainants, their affiliations, nature of their complaints and disposition of the case.
3. All IRB board members involved with a particular case should have their identity publicly available.
4. Any institutions whose IRB acts on a complaint that was clearly made in bad faith should face the following sanctions.
A. All participants in the bad faith review should be permanently reviewed from the IRB.
B. All participants in the bad faith review should have all their IRB reviewed projects subject to immediate review for cancellation due to professional misconduct by the member.
C. The university should forfeit tripe the overhead generated from the relevant project as a fine to be paid to the researchers subject to the bad faith IRB review.
Personal and professional accountability for complainants, IRB members and the institution for failure to prevent misuse of the compliant process will greatly reduce such instances. Good luck!
What happens if someone files a complaint about the IRB itself? Does the IRB have to then instantiate an external audit of itself and have six months of meetings thereby tying up its tyrannical resources.?
The primary purpose of higher education is to protect privilege. It's been that way since the Norman Conquerors established Oxford University. See *The Goose Step* by Upton Sinclair or *The Corruption of Economics* by Mason Gaffney and Fred Harrison. They show how, to protect monopoly privilege, corporate monopolists took over boards of directors and/or set up their own schools of economics. It's why every reform movement contains elements that protect monopoly privilege.
What would have happened if you had simply ignored the problem and the requests for documentation, etc.? Would you have gotten fired?
I was on the IRB at U. Pitt for about 5 years and vice-chairman of it for about 4, so I know a little about how things were and are done in them. There's no way a questionnaire is anything but an exempt protocol since the potential for harm is zero.
At this point, you're in the driver's seat, if you want to be. Stop playing by their rules and let yourself get fired. Then sue for retaliatory discrimination. It will be a gimme. There is no victory in defense. Stop playing defense.
I doubt fired, but I would have been prevented from getting IRB approval for any future projects. If I then proceeded anyway, I probably would have been subjected to progressively increasingly severe penalties, up to and including firing.
No guts, no glory. Most of my friends--and I--have been fired at least once for doing the right thing rather than what we were told to do. But I certainly agree that it's always better not to have to put up with that.
But we made our beds. And none of us regretted it.
And, all things considered, its pretty much working for me. As I wrote in reply to another comment, you can't fight every battle so you need to choose them carefully. This really was more "pain in the arse" than existential threat. Such pains come with almost any job (by "such pains" I don't mean IRB nonsense, but I do mean ridiculous rules and having to stay in the boss's good graces. Unless you are in your own business. Then you are still at the mercy of your clientele. So I've chosen my poison...
This was an important story to document. Bureaucrats and administrators like the ones in this IRB are probably either ideologues or lack spines to challenge groupthink because they would be ostracized or it might imperil their next promotions. There are probably more stories like this out there but they happen to junior professors who do not speak out.
Similar things like this happen in the bureaucracies of journal editors who also have nearly unchallenged power to publish, reject, promote complaints, or reject complaints.
It’s fine for bureaucrats like these to have power for organizations to run efficiently but there is such a lack of diversity viewpoint in academia that there are no internal checks and balances. The same dogma runs to the top. Who would you complain to?
& actually Lingua Franca had a great article back in 2000 when social science IRBs started becoming more bureaucratic that anticipated all of these issues!
Great, but why are you telling us? We aren't in much of a position to help. Are you not working within the Rutgers system to protect your interests?
Your antagonists are working aggressively within the system. You need to as well. If there isn't an apparent pathway for you, you must create one. Just like your antagonists did.
Have you filed formal complaints? Requested inquiries? Spoken to deans? I see no evidence of it, from this piece.
I can think of few things more disheartening to read about, than stories of people subjected to injustices who took no self-empowered action to protect themselves.
You have EVERY RIGHT to be treated fairly. Time that you started acting like it.
I am not sure Hazel-rah is wrong here. The simple answer to Hazel-rah's suggestion that we work inside the system is ... who has time for that? But I have not decided NOT to do that. Still weighing my options here, but the path of least resistance is to just move on; its not like I do not have ten zillion vastly more satisfying things to work on. You can think of my reticence here as a "you need to choose your battles" issue. Although I have not chosen NOT to do battle on it internally, I have not yet decided to do so, either.
Nate and Lee, I am so sorry to hear you have gone through this experience. This is clearly misuse of the IRB system to engage in harassment. There are some clear steps that should be taken at the institutional and FEDERAL level to address this problem.
1. No anonymous complaints of any kind should be permitted related to IRB issues. As such, any complaint was must attached with the identity, affiliation and contact information of the party making the complaint. Refusal to provide this information should be grounds to dismiss the complaint with prejudice WHILE also informing the accused of the nature of the dismissed complaint AND the identity of the complainant.
2. Any complaint found not to be based on merit should not only be dismissed with prejudice, but the complainant should be barred permanently from filing any complaints of any kind with ANY IRB nationally in perpetuity. This would be enforced via creating a public facing database revealing the identity of all such complainants, their affiliations, nature of their complaints and disposition of the case.
3. All IRB board members involved with a particular case should have their identity publicly available.
4. Any institutions whose IRB acts on a complaint that was clearly made in bad faith should face the following sanctions.
A. All participants in the bad faith review should be permanently reviewed from the IRB.
B. All participants in the bad faith review should have all their IRB reviewed projects subject to immediate review for cancellation due to professional misconduct by the member.
C. The university should forfeit tripe the overhead generated from the relevant project as a fine to be paid to the researchers subject to the bad faith IRB review.
Personal and professional accountability for complainants, IRB members and the institution for failure to prevent misuse of the compliant process will greatly reduce such instances. Good luck!
What happens if someone files a complaint about the IRB itself? Does the IRB have to then instantiate an external audit of itself and have six months of meetings thereby tying up its tyrannical resources.?
IRB way outside of their role here. Weaponized. This is survey research FFS not a liver transplant !
The primary purpose of higher education is to protect privilege. It's been that way since the Norman Conquerors established Oxford University. See *The Goose Step* by Upton Sinclair or *The Corruption of Economics* by Mason Gaffney and Fred Harrison. They show how, to protect monopoly privilege, corporate monopolists took over boards of directors and/or set up their own schools of economics. It's why every reform movement contains elements that protect monopoly privilege.
What would have happened if you had simply ignored the problem and the requests for documentation, etc.? Would you have gotten fired?
I was on the IRB at U. Pitt for about 5 years and vice-chairman of it for about 4, so I know a little about how things were and are done in them. There's no way a questionnaire is anything but an exempt protocol since the potential for harm is zero.
At this point, you're in the driver's seat, if you want to be. Stop playing by their rules and let yourself get fired. Then sue for retaliatory discrimination. It will be a gimme. There is no victory in defense. Stop playing defense.
I doubt fired, but I would have been prevented from getting IRB approval for any future projects. If I then proceeded anyway, I probably would have been subjected to progressively increasingly severe penalties, up to and including firing.
No guts, no glory. Most of my friends--and I--have been fired at least once for doing the right thing rather than what we were told to do. But I certainly agree that it's always better not to have to put up with that.
But we made our beds. And none of us regretted it.
Heh. I like my job and at my age/level of seniority, I'd not likely find a similar one.
ICYMI, see my entry here: https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/my-vita-of-denunciation
And, all things considered, its pretty much working for me. As I wrote in reply to another comment, you can't fight every battle so you need to choose them carefully. This really was more "pain in the arse" than existential threat. Such pains come with almost any job (by "such pains" I don't mean IRB nonsense, but I do mean ridiculous rules and having to stay in the boss's good graces. Unless you are in your own business. Then you are still at the mercy of your clientele. So I've chosen my poison...
Understood.
This was an important story to document. Bureaucrats and administrators like the ones in this IRB are probably either ideologues or lack spines to challenge groupthink because they would be ostracized or it might imperil their next promotions. There are probably more stories like this out there but they happen to junior professors who do not speak out.
Similar things like this happen in the bureaucracies of journal editors who also have nearly unchallenged power to publish, reject, promote complaints, or reject complaints.
It’s fine for bureaucrats like these to have power for organizations to run efficiently but there is such a lack of diversity viewpoint in academia that there are no internal checks and balances. The same dogma runs to the top. Who would you complain to?
& actually Lingua Franca had a great article back in 2000 when social science IRBs started becoming more bureaucratic that anticipated all of these issues!
“Don’t Talk to the Humans”
I forget the author name rn
Great, but why are you telling us? We aren't in much of a position to help. Are you not working within the Rutgers system to protect your interests?
Your antagonists are working aggressively within the system. You need to as well. If there isn't an apparent pathway for you, you must create one. Just like your antagonists did.
Have you filed formal complaints? Requested inquiries? Spoken to deans? I see no evidence of it, from this piece.
I can think of few things more disheartening to read about, than stories of people subjected to injustices who took no self-empowered action to protect themselves.
You have EVERY RIGHT to be treated fairly. Time that you started acting like it.
This is not a Rutgers specific problem and they are following IRB “best practice” to n behaving this way. The pushback has to be meta institutional
I am not sure Hazel-rah is wrong here. The simple answer to Hazel-rah's suggestion that we work inside the system is ... who has time for that? But I have not decided NOT to do that. Still weighing my options here, but the path of least resistance is to just move on; its not like I do not have ten zillion vastly more satisfying things to work on. You can think of my reticence here as a "you need to choose your battles" issue. Although I have not chosen NOT to do battle on it internally, I have not yet decided to do so, either.
I would recommend reading Richard Schweder on this and also Schrag’s book
_Ethical Imperialism_ (I forget the author’s first name)
There are people pushing back on IRB overreach
Incredibly disturbing and sadly representative of broader trends to use bureaucracies to harass and intimidate.
If IRBs claim that questions are offensive, what they mean is that the likely answers to those questions will turn out to be embarrassing.
like in the Wikipedia occupation by activists, it looks like rule / process hacking is an expertise of those ghouls