Professor Eric Stewart has co-authored a number of papers on racism while working at Florida State University’s highly ranked College of Criminology. Back in April there was a report claiming that, after six of those papers were retracted because of problems with the data, Stewart had left his position at the school. It turns out Stewart had only been placed on administrative leave at that point but wasn’t actually fired until this month. Two weeks ago the school sent him a 5-page letter explaining that his incompetence had done “catastrophic” damage to the school.

This letter serves to officially notify you that the Florida State University (FSU) is terminating you from your position as Professor in the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, effective July 13, 2023…

My specific concerns are related to the details of your behavior and the extreme negligence and incompetence that you demonstrated in the performance of your duties. As outlined in the Notice of Intent to Terminate Letter, you 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. 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, as you were fully responsible for the integrity of the results generated in your data analyses, 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.

As I described here, these retracted research studies often had to do with racism. One of his co-authors on a 2011 paper first raised the issue of Stweart’s data handling back in 2019:

The study tested if the public’s prejudicial views impacted their desire for harsher sentences for black and hispanic Americans. The published findings were that as black and hispanic populations grew, so did the public’s want for more discriminatory sentences. Except – Pickett discovered – this was not the case.

In the original data, no relationship was found between growing minority populations and demands for increased sentences. If anything, Pickett pointed out, it was quite the opposite.

Pickett found that their sample size somehow had increased from 500 to over 1,000 respondents, the counties polled had decreased from 326 to 91, and the data was altered to the point of mathematical impossibility.

Before you feel too sorry for FSU, keep in mind that they opened an investigation into Stewart’s research led by a three-person committee. Stewart, who is black, claimed his career had been “lynched” by his former co-author, Professor Justin Pickett, who is white. The FSU committee concluded there was no evidence of fraud and closed the investigation before it really began. In short, he very nearly got away with it even after five of his papers had been retracted.

But professor Pickett stuck with it and wrote a lengthy analysis of those five papers. One of the things he pointed out is that while Steward had been responsible for the data handling on all five papers, his co-authors on those papers were all very high-profile criminologists.

The coauthors of the five retracted articles include two past editors of Criminology, the flagship journal of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), as well as three ASC Fellows and two ASC vice presidents…

To my knowledge, none of the coauthors have spoken publicly about what happened in the retracted articles, except to insist in the retraction notices that the irregularities resulted from “coding mistakes” and “transcription errors” (Law & Society Review 2020; Criminology 2020a; b), and to defend the accuracy of the retracted findings (Law & Society Review 2020).

So it sort of looks like a lot of top people bent over backwards to downplay this. Whether that was out of concern for their own reputations or some ideological affinity with the research Stewart was producing, I’ll leave for you to decide. But it took four years of prodding and a 6th retraction for the university to finally change its tune.

The rest of the letter is spent responding to points raised by professor Stewart in his response to the school’s March notification that it intended to fire him. There’s some new information that suggests Stewart, in addition to being a terrible researcher, wasn’t much of a teacher either.

Following the removal of you from the classroom, more concerning information was discovered, and although it was not included in the original Notice of Intent to Terminate Letter, I believe it further supports the proposed action to terminate your employment. In one of the online courses you were assigned to teach, it was discovered by a subsequent instructor that “class instruction appeared to be minimal at best, and meaningless at worst” because you provided no additional information to students beyond what was contained in the required text. There were no class discussions, only one posting, and all exams were drawn entirely from the publisher-produced questions from the textbook. According to your teaching assistant, you forwarded all emails from students to her and she was responsible for dealing with students and responding to their emails. In your in-person course, Introduction to Research Methods, the new instructor noted that students were not attending class which, according to reports by students and the assigned teaching assistant, was because they perceived no benefit. It was explained that you did nothing more than simply cover what was already covered in the textbook. On Canvas, it was noted that you often cancelled class or did a “remote” class, and you would simply read from a presentation that appeared to be created by the publisher. Again, it was noted that the exams and quizzes in this class were drawn solely from publisher-produced materials.

Did Stewart only recently give up teaching or was he always this way? If the latter, how is it that no one noticed any of this until a few months ago? The letter concludes:

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. Therefore, I am proceeding with a termination.

It makes you wonder how many more racism researchers are out there whose data is the result of wishful thinking.