FSU’s provost said the incident could have ‘unalterable’ consequences for the school
A Florida university has fired a professor after an investigation concluded he “demonstrated extreme negligence” in the data management of racial bias studies that could cause “unalterable” damage to the school’s reputation.
In a scathing five-page termination letter penned by Florida State University’s (FUS) Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, James Clark informed criminologist Eric Stewart that decades of his research “once thought to be at the forefront” of the profession were shown to contain “numerous erroneous and “false narratives.”
“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,” Clark wrote.
“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,” he added.
Criminologist Eric Stewart worked at Florida State University for 16 years before he was terminated. (Facebook Screenshot/Florida State University)
As reported by The College Fix and corroborated by the letter, Stewart had previously refuted the evidence of FSU’s misconduct inquiry committee’s lengthy investigation and stated the reports “indicate that the misconduct claims were rejected by multiple panel experts.”
However, Clark’s termination letter to Stewart suggested the criminologist did not take “any meaningful steps” to remedy the situation in the four years since the issues came to light and did not attempt to re-create any of the studies.
“You have not pursued any remedial action, and you have even refused to cooperate with your FSU colleagues and coworkers who requested to work with you on these matters,” the letter continued.
He had been at the school for 16 years at the time of his departure.
Stewart left his post in March following the lengthy investigation that began when six race-related studies he co-authored were retracted.
In one paper, Stewart, who made $190,000 per year at FSU, falsely claimed there was a correlation between a criminal’s race and the public’s desire to see harsher prison sentences for said criminal. However, an investigation revealed no correlation and that the sample size had been increased to yield Stewart’s desired outcome.
Justin Pickett, one of the study’s co-authors, previously claimed that the “identified discrepancies” in Stewart’s work could not be attributed to “researcher error.”
“Scientific fraud occurs all too frequently….and I believe it is the most likely explanation for the data irregularities in the five retracted articles,” Pickett said.
