Turning Point USA

A highly regarded criminology professor at Florida State University (FSU) who presented research “proving” the existence of systemic racism has been fired after the school found him guilty of “extreme negligence and incompetence” and falsifying information.

Former Professor Eric A. Stewart was fired from his position at FSU. The university alleged in its termination letter, obtained by Retraction Watch, that Stewart “demonstrated extreme negligence in basic data management, resulting in an unprecedented number of articles retracted, numerous other articles now in question, with the presence of no backup of the data for the publications in question.” He has had six of his research papers retracted to date.

According to the New York Post, Justin Pickett, a University of Albany criminology professor, co-authored a research paper with Stewart in 2011 seeking to determine whether or not whites were demanding longer sentences for minorities. Pickett was the first to sound the alarm on Stewart’s unethical research practices.

The Post’s report claims Pickett expressed the study’s conclusions pointed to a lack of evidence to support their hypothesis, but the final paper was published with “altered” data, indicating a correlation where there was none. Pickett noted that the sample size grew from 500 actual respondents to 1,184 in the final paper.

Stewart is one of many “researchers” who propagated the claim that systemic racism not only exists within U.S. institutions, more predominantly in criminal justice, but that it has caused decades of social and economic oppression of minorities. His work was cited over 8,500 times by other researchers, according to Google Scholar.

The American Society of Criminology, where Stewart was a vice president and fellow, honored him as one of four highly distinguished criminologists in 2017.

In a study from 2015, Stewart claimed that “Latino population growth and perceived Latino criminal and economic threat significantly predict punitive Latino sentiment.” In a 2018 study by Stewart, which has also been retracted, he claims that white people perceive minorities as “criminal threats,” and this belief could lead to “state-sponsored social control.”

FSU Provost James J. Clark, who authored Stewart’s letter of termination, stated that “The damage to the standing of the University and, in particular, the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice and its faculty approaches the catastrophic and may be unalterable.”

“Because of your actions,” Clark continued, “decades of research that were once thought to be at the forefront of the Criminology discipline, have been shown to contain numerous erroneous and false narratives.”

Clark told Stewart that his falsification of evidence has put other FSU professors’ reputations “in jeopardy” and said that “Graduate students have expressed their concerns with being connected to the situation by simply being in the same College as you.”

Because of the socially acceptable conclusions his work drew, Stewart has been granted over $3.5 million from private and tax-payer-funded entities, “such as the National Science Foundation which is part of the federal government, and the National Institute of Justice, which is operated by the Justice Department and Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice,” according to the Post Millennial.

The Post Millennial also found that “An arm of the National Institute of Health, The National Institute of Mental Health, funneled $3.2 million into research on how African Americans transition into adulthood, the research which Stewart supervised from 2007-2012 as co-principal investigator.”

Stewart also served on FSU’s diversity, promotion, and tenure committees, as well as the FSU Academic Honor Policy Hearing Committee, “where he presided over decisions regarding students accused of academic dishonesty and cheating,” the outlet states.