Florida State University criminology professor Eric Stewart was a guru of the claim that “systemic racism” infests America’s police and American society.
The New York Post reported that the long time professor has been fired after almost 20 years of his data — including figures used in an explosive study, which claimed the legacy of lynchings made whites perceive blacks as criminals, and that the problem was worse among conservatives — were found to be in question.
College authorities said he was being fired for “incompetence” and “false results.”
Among the studies he has had to retract were claims that whites wanted longer sentences for blacks and Latinos.
To date, six of Stewart’s articles published in major academic journals like Criminology and Law and Society Review between 2003 and 2019 have been fully retracted after allegations the professor’s data was fake or so badly flawed it should not have been published.
The professor’s termination came four years after his former graduate student Justin Pickett blew the whistle on his research.
Pickett said they had worked together in 2011 researching whether the public was demanding longer sentences for black and Hispanic criminals as those minority populations grew, with the paper claiming they did. But Stewart had fiddled the sample size to deliver that result when the real research did not, Pickett said.
When the investigation into Stewart began in 2020, he claimed he was the victim and that Pickett “essentially lynched me and my academic character.”
After sixteen years as a professor of criminology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Provost James Clark formally notified Stewart he was being terminated in a July 13 letter.
“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 wrote to Stewart.
Clark said as well as the six officially retracted studies, other work by Stewart was “in doubt.”
The retracted studies looked into the role of racial discrimination in America’s criminal justice system.
One 2019 study, which has been retracted, suggested historical lynchings make white people today perceive black people as threats.
Another retracted 2018 study suggested that white Americans view black and Latino people as “criminal threats,” and suggested that perceived threat could lead to “state-sponsored social control.”
And in a third, Stewart claimed Americans wanted tougher sentences for Latinos because their community was increasing in numbers and becoming more economically successful.
“Latino population growth and perceived Latino criminal and economic threat significantly predict punitive Latino sentiment,” he concluded in the 2015 study, which has now been retracted.
Stewart rose to prominence as an influencer in his field despite his studies from as early as 2003 now being retracted.
Stewart was a widely-cited scholar, with north of 8,500 citations by other researchers, according to Google Scholar — a measure of his clout as an academic.
He was vice president and fellow at the American Society of Criminology, who honored him as one of four highly distinguished criminologists in 2017.
He was also a W.E.B. DuBois fellow at the National Institute of Justice.
The professor received north of $3.5 million in grant support from major organizations and taxpayer-funded entities, according to his resume.
The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, the National Science Foundation, which is an arm of the federal government, and the National Institute of Justice, which is run by the Department of Justice, have all funneled money into research Stewart presided over.
Stewart also made an annual salary of $190,000 from FSU.
He served on the school’s diversity, promotion and tenure committees, giving him a say over who got ahead on campus.
The fired professor, 51, graduated from Fort Valley State University and earned his Ph.D. from Iowa State University in 2000.
