Professor fired for 'incompetence' and 'false results' after 6 studies were retracted on topics like systemic racism and lynching

A Florida State University professor was fired “extreme negligence” after much of his research, including six studies, were retracted.

Criminology professor Eric Stewart was known in April 2023 to have left his $190,000 per year position, but the exact nature of his departure was a mystery until now.

The New York Post has reported that Stewart was indeed fired and that FSU officials said it was due to “incompetence” and “false results.”

Originally reported by the Florida Standard, Williams faced heavy scrutiny from a former colleague named Justin Pickett from the University of Albany. Pickett, who worked with Stewart on a retracted 2011 study, claimed that Stewart muddied the waters in his papers.

Pickett said he asked that a study he was involved with be retracted because the data was altered to the point of mathematical impossibility.

The study reported that as populations of black and Hispanic Americans grew, the public desire for discriminatory sentences also grew. However, Pickett later noticed that the sample size of the study somehow grew from 500 to over 1,000 and the number of counties polled dropped from 326 to 91.

Stewart's retracted studies largely focused on race and pointed toward racial bias in the justice system in regards to the punishment of black and Latino criminals.

The studies featured titles like "Ethnic threat and social control: Examining public support for judicial use of ethnicity in punishment" from 2011.

Two other studies focused on lynching, titled "Lynchings, racial threat, and whites' punitive views towards blacks" (2018) and "A legacy of lynchings: Perceived black criminal threat among whites" (2019).

A 2018 study titled "The social context of criminal threat, victim race, and punitive black and latino sentiment" suggested that white Americans view black people and Latinos as “criminal threats” and that the perceived threat could cause “state-sponsored social control.”

"The social context of latino threat and punitive latino sentiment," another retracted study from 2015, concluded that “Latino population growth and perceived Latino criminal and economic threat significantly predict punitive Latino sentiment."

The New York Post also noted Stewart's online CV, which boasted $3,666,031 in grants from major organizations and taxpayer-funded entities.

FSU and Stewart did not respond to requests for comment.

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