I mean, the "publicity" here was the paper announcement and some arguing on Twitter involving the professor, that's not automatic "department leadership needs to look into this" material. If the IRB didn't find anything, it also didn't have a reason to involve leadership. As said elsewhere, something should probably have been noticed at that point, but they intend to look into that. Seems fair, as long as that's what they do properly.
I'm not able to give them the benefit of the doubt; or at least, if they are so inept they should be rejected by the scientific community.
Imagine this: "After thorough research, we discovered that we were able to cause the deaths of numerous individuals by knowingly constructing an unsafe bridge and having it pass municipal inspection."
That's the level of unethical research that the U of Mn approved.
The department leadership never approved the research. Why does no one seem to understand that universities don't work like corporations? You never have to get your research ideas approved up the chain of command. You just start working on them (after running them by an IRB if you think that's necessary).
The IRB is not "leadership", and the IRB process is usually not very adversial, i.e. primarily based on how the researchers represent their own work. (which is a flaw, but one thats common to how this works, not necessarily some special failure of UMN - which is why more investigation is needed)
