A Florida State University professor has been fired for “faking data” to prove that the legacy of lynching “makes whites want longer sentences for blacks” as part of his long-running work on “systemic racism.” Six of the professor’s studies have since been retracted.
Florida State criminology professor Eric Stewart, who claimed that “systemic racism” infests America’s police and American society, is now out of a job after nearly 20 years of his data was called into question, according to a report by the New York Post.
Florida State University
So far, six of the professor’s articles published in major academic journals — such as Criminology and Law and Society Review — between 2003 and 2019 have been fully retracted following allegations that Stewart’s data was fake or extremely flawed.
One of Stewart’s retracted studies from 2019 had suggested that the history of lynching’s in the United States has made it so that white Americans perceive black people as criminals, and that the problem is worse among conservatives.
Another retracted 2018 study had claimed that white Americans view black and Latino people as “criminal threats,” and even suggested that perceived threat could lead to “state-sponsored social control.”
A third retracted study had claimed that white Americans want tougher sentences for Latinos due to their community getting larger in America and them finding economic success.
“Latino population growth and perceived Latino criminal and economic threat significantly predict punitive Latino sentiment,” Stewart concluded in his 2015 study, which has now been retracted.
Florida State reportedly said that Stewart was fired for “incompetence,” and “false results.” The professor’s exit from the university came four years after his former graduate student, Justin Pickett, became a whistleblowers on his research.
Pickett said that he and Stewart had been researching whether the public wanted longer sentences for black and Hispanic criminals as their populations grew, but that Stewart had messed with the sample size to produce a result that was not real.
When Stewart’s research was later investigated in 2020, the professor claimed he was the victim, saying Pickett “essentially lynched me and my academic character.”
In July, Florida State University in Tallahassee Provost James Clark told Stewart — who had spent 16 years at the school as a professor of criminology — that he had been terminated.
“I do not see how you can teach our students to be ethical researchers or how the results of future research projects conducted by you could be deemed as trustworthy,” Clark told Stewart in a July 13 letter.
Stewart had become a prominent influencer in his field, and has been cited more than 8,500 times by other researchers, according to Google Scholar.
The professor was also vice president and fellow at the American Society of Criminology, and served as a W.E.B. DuBois fellow at the National Institute of Justice.
Additionally, Stewart has received more than $3.5 million in grant support from major organizations and taxpayer-funded entities, according to his resume.
Stewart had also raked in a $190,000 annual salary at Florida State, where he served on the school’s diversity, promotion, and tenure committees, giving him pull regarding who got ahead at the university, the Post reported.
Ironically, the disgraced professor had even passed judgment on students accused of cheating as a member of the university’s Academic Honor Policy Hearing Committee.
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