Florida State University (FSU) has fired Criminology professor Eric Stewart for "extreme negligence" after several of his research studies, including six in total, were retracted.
The exact details of Stewart's departure from his $190,000 per year position were previously unknown, but it has now been revealed that he was indeed fired. FSU officials cited "incompetence" and "false results" as the reasons for his termination.
The firing of Stewart came after heavy scrutiny from a former colleague, Justin Pickett from the University of Albany, who had worked with Stewart on a retracted study in 2011. Pickett alleged that Stewart had manipulated data in his papers, leading him to request the retraction of their joint study.
Pickett claimed that the data had been altered to the point of mathematical impossibility. Specifically, Pickett discovered discrepancies in the sample size of the study, which had inexplicably increased from 500 to over 1,000, while the number of counties polled had decreased from 326 to 91.
Stewart's retracted studies primarily focused on race and highlighted racial bias in the justice system, particularly in relation to the punishment of black and Latino criminals. The titles of these studies included "Ethnic threat and social control: Examining public support for judicial use of ethnicity in punishment" (2011), "Lynchings, racial threat, and whites' punitive views towards blacks" (2018), "A legacy of lynchings: Perceived black criminal threat among whites" (2019), and "The social context of criminal threat, victim race, and punitive black and Latino sentiment" (2018).
These studies suggested that white Americans perceive black people and Latinos as "criminal threats" and that this perception could lead to "state-sponsored social control."
Another retracted study from 2015, titled "The social context of Latino threat and punitive Latino sentiment," concluded that the growth of the Latino population and the perceived Latino criminal and economic threat significantly predicted punitive sentiment among Latinos.
In addition to his retracted studies, Stewart's online CV boasted a total of $3,666,031 in grants from major organizations and taxpayer-funded entities.
Login