Florida State fires professor

Florida State University has fired Eric Stewart, a professor of criminology, for “extreme negligence” in research, The Tallahassee Democrat reported.

The charges against Stewart followed a full investigation into his research.

A letter to Stewart from James Clark, the provost, said: “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.”

Justin Pickett, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Albany, of the State University of New York, said Stewart allegedly made racism seem more common than it is through his data and surveys that altered sample sizes in five co-authored research papers where he was responsible for data and analyses.

Repeated attempts to reach Stewart for comment were unsuccessful. But he denied any fraud and instead said that the problems resulted from “analysis errors that included coding mistakes and transcription errors,” according to withdrawal letters he wrote to the journals that published the studies.

In a response to the intent to terminate letter in March, Stewart stated that the investigation and process to terminate him were “arbitrary, capricious and discriminatory in nature.”