A Florida State University (FSU) professor has reportedly left his $190,000-a-year position at the school after being accused of fabricating data to make racism against black and Hispanic Americans seem more common than it actually is.
Professor Eric Stewart had six of his research studies on the U.S. criminal justice system retracted, humiliating FSU’s top-ranked criminology department, according to a report by The Florida Standard.
In one paper, Stewart was accused of falsifying data by University of Albany professor Justin Pickett, who co-authored a 2011 study with the FSU professor.
Stewart is accused of falsely claiming the study revealed there was a correlation between a criminal’s race and the public’s desire for harsher prison sentences. He argued that as black and Hispanic populations grew, so did the public’s want for more discriminatory sentences.
But that was not true, as the original data apparently showed no relationship between growing minority populations and demands for increased prison sentences.
Pickett said that their sample size had somehow 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. Thus, he accused Stewart of doctoring the sample size so that the study yielded his desired outcome.
Stewart reportedly refused to provide a copy of the original data for over four months after Pickett confronted him.
Soon after, that study — and five others dating back to 2006 — were retracted.
Pickett now says the problem of data manipulation is widespread in academia.
“There’s a huge monetary incentive to falsify data and there’s no accountability. If you do this, the probability you’ll get caught is so, so low,” Pickett told The Florida Standard. “There’s too much incentive to fake data and too little oversight.”
Stewart, who obtained his Ph.D in sociology from Iowa State University, had been working at Florida State University for sixteen years.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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