Florida State University criminology professor leaves after being accused of falsifying data

A Florida State University criminology professor suddenly left his $190,000-a-year position after being accused of falsifying records to make racism seem more common than it is.

Professor Eric Stewart has had six of his studies – one of which dates back to 2006 – withdrawn over allegations that he fabricated data by altering the sample size.

Stewart has denied such criticism, but after the sixth incident in 2020, an FSU committee reconvened to discuss his record and findings.

He has been absent from Florida State University since last month, perhaps marking the end of his 16-year career at the school and a years-long investigation into his academic malpractice, the florida standard reported.

In 2011, Stewart co-authored a study that purported to show that as black and Hispanic populations grew, the public increasingly demanded longer sentences for black and Hispanic criminals.

The study was designed to test whether the public held biased views about minority groups and whether that influenced sentencing.

Stewart was eventually called upon by a colleague, Justin Pickett, another University of Albany criminologist with whom he had written that paper.

Pickett notes that the original uncorrupted data showed that there was no correlation between the growth of minority groups and the severity of the criminal sentences inflicted on them.

He published his own paper and pointed out problems in their paper, some of which he said had been introduced just before publication.

“The data has also been altered in other ways — intentionally or unintentionally — and those changes produced the key findings of the paper,” Pickett wrote.

Among other inaccuracies, he pointed out that their article claimed that their study was based on 1,184 respondents, but it was actually only 500.

“There is only one possible conclusion from re-analyzing the data I have: the sample was not just duplicated in the analysis for the published article; the data was also changed, whether intentionally or unintentionally, and those changes led to the key findings of the paper,” Pickett wrote.

He says when he brought the issues to Stewart’s attention and asked for specifics, he was ignored for four months, the Florida Standard reported.

Later, four other papers, all co-written by Stewart between 2006 and 2015, were also withdrawn, and eventually Florida State University agreed to conduct an investigation led by a three-person committee. Two of those three had co-written articles with him, the Standard noted.

Stewart told administrators that Pickett’s claims “lynched me and my academic character,” saying that was especially important given that five of his six studies were race-related and Stewart himself is black.

The committee decided not to take any action, but then a new controversy arose in 2020 involving Stewart in a sixth paper.

“There is a huge financial incentive to falsify data and there is no accountability. If you do this, the chances of getting caught are so, so small,” Pickett told the Florida Standard.

‘There is too much incentive to falsify data and too little supervision.’