Institutional Review Boards (IRB) were instituted to protect the rights of research participants and due to past (and at times egregious) practices committed in the name of research. We question whether the IRB is currently overstepping its bounds into the domain of the researcher. We illustrate possible ways in which the IRB subtlety and not so subtlety challenge faculty professionalism and limit faculty research independence, highlighting some instances in which qualitative research topics bump up against boards that mistrust or misunderstand the nature of qualitative research. Using case study vignettes from five universities, our concerns focused on mission creep and potentially legitimating censorship. Areas of mission creep can include institutional reputation, methodological design, and chilling/legal language verses accessible language. In addition we consider multisite studies and when committees focus too much on form rather than content. Keywords: Human Subjects, IRB, Institutional Review Board, Ethics, Academic Freedom, Faculty Professionalism, Qualitative Research

On February 25, 2011, Associate Professor Jin Li sued Brown University for excluding her from using data that Li collected over a three-year period which she believed was under Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval (Jin Li v. Brown University in Providence in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, 2011). Li sued Brown on five counts, including overreach of the IRB authority, failure to have minority representation on the board, and lack of due process in appealing their decision. Li’s main complaint was that the institution was “barring her from using her own data because she paid her human research subjects different amounts of money based on their economic status,”(Barrett, 2011) which was a change from the original IRB proposal. She made the change because it was costing participants more than the original amount to participate. With this decision, Li used the kind of emergent mindset that typifies qualitative researchers in the field--" an openness to contingency, shifting slightly in order to respond to participants needs"(Leisey, 2008, pp. 422-423). However, changes require an additional review by the IRB, and Li did not seek such approval. Ultimately, Li and Brown University reached an out-of-court settlement and requested a case dismissal. Li did violate the human subjects’ policies of the institution because of her disparate compensation, yet the consequences seemed disproportionately severe. While the Li case is a dramatic and somewhat complicated example, this examination leads us to question whether IRBs may be slowly and quietly limiting faculty research and applying a single standard to a diverse body of research. It appears there is often only one standard penalty for all IRB violations: the researcher cannot use the data. Some violations