Follow the science
/
Professor fired for faking data that “proved” whites want longer sentences for blacks.
Florida State University criminology professor Eric Stewart was a guru of the claim that “systemic racism” infests America’s police and American society.
Now he’s out of a job on account of “extreme negligence” in his research.
The academic was 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.”
…. Stewart’s research also delved into the relationship between incarceration and divorce, street violence, the impact of tough neighborhoods on adolescents, whether street gardens reduce crime, and how race impacts student discipline in schools.
But the disgraced professor was able to rise 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 replication crisis — the failure of independent attempts to replicate another “scientific” study’s conclusions — has been known for decades. Hard science research papers have a dismal track record (with global warming claims the worst, with what I suspect is a zero replication rate) but sociology studies are entirely worthless, just like the university departments that spawn them.
