Justin Pickett’s Righteous Charge

There’s a shortage of heroes in Current Year. I found one! A criminologist who doesn’t just expose crime even among his peers… he knows that taking flack means you’re over the target!

FSU professor fired; provost says research ‘negligence’ caused near ‘catastrophic’ damage

h ttps://www.yahoo.com/news/fsu-professor-fired-provost-says-090026000.html

By Tarah Jean for the Tallahassee Democrat, 27 July 2023

I suspect the reason this is a news story as of Sept. 11 is because he exhausted his appeal. More on that later. Meanwhile, this article is a good intro.

Florida State University research professor of criminology Eric Stewart has been fired following a full investigation into ongoing, questionable research allegations from the past four years.

The decision was effective Thursday, July 13, and stated in a five-page termination letter to Stewart from FSU’s Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs James Clark, firing Stewart from the position he held since 2007.

“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,” Clark stated in the termination letter.

Stewart is… was, a nationally-recognized, tenured criminologist, so no, he didn’t get fired for negligence. You gotta try to lose your tenure.

Stewart is also black in addition to tenured, which is both why he committed his upcoming, race-motivated hate crimes and is NOT in prison for a zillion years to life.

Stewart earned his bachelor’s degree in criminology from Fort Valley State University in 1995, a master’s degree in sociology from Auburn University in 1996 and a doctoral degree in sociology from Iowa State University in 2000.

After graduating, he began his teaching career as an assistant professor of sociology at Georgia State University followed by his time at the University of Missouri-St. Louis as an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice.

He joined FSU in 2007 as an associate professor of criminology with a $90,000 annual salary before being promoted to full professor in 2011 and being named Ronald L. Simons Professor of Criminology in 2016, which ultimately landed him a $190,000 annual salary.

Then came the multi-million dollar grants from the National Institute of Justice, the National Institute of Health… prestigious awards from criminology societies….

It’s an old story. He was blakk, he wrote papers that supported the blakk-persecution Narrative, and with all the boxes checked, was escorted into the halls of shame, err, power. Nothing says multigenerational race persecution like a six-digit salary from your tormentors.

Photo credit to notthebee.com.

Florida State University research professor of criminology Eric Stewart has been fired following a full investigation into ongoing, questionable research allegations from the past four years.

The decision was effective Thursday, July 13, and stated in a five-page termination letter to Stewart from FSU’s Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs James Clark, firing Stewart from the position he held since 2007.

It took FOUR YEARS to terminate a high-profile academic who refused to share or maintain any evidence regarding his work.

Justin T. Pickett. No relation to James T. Kirk.

Timeline from my research

2011 Pickett co-authors a study with Stewart, being the latter’s teaching assistant, and receives his doctoral degree in criminology from FSU. An implication is that one of the studies Pickett calls out as fraudulent was the basis for his own PhD.

15 Nov 2017 Stewart is honored by the American Society of Criminology, per FSU, “for his collective body of scholarly work and his service to the association.” He previously served the Society as executive counselor and VP.

2018 Pickett is anonymously notified of misconduct in the paper he co-authored in 2011. He investigates and gets stonewalled by Stewart when asking for raw data.

2019 Pickett calls for the study’s retraction in a 27-page manifesto of errors and concerns. The other five retractions happen shortly afterward. An FSU Research Misconduct Inquiry turns up no misconduct despite the unprecedented retractions, because the retractions proved that any problem had already been solved.

2020 More allegations. An FSU Research Misconduct Inquiry turns up no misconduct.

2021 More allegations. An FSU Research Misconduct Inquiry turns up no misconduct.

2022 A full investigation is launched and discovers Stewart doesn’t even teach his classes.

July 2023 Stewart is fired for gross negligence and incompetence, but he is not accused of any criminal or ethics violations, and is offered the chance to appeal.

Sept 2023 The appeal apparently fails.

Quintet of study retractions rocks criminology community

h ttps://www.science.org/content/article/quintet-study-retractions-rocks-criminology-community

By Dalmeet Singh Chawla, 26 November 2019

Criminology researchers are retracting five studies that have sparked a bitter battle over potential scientific misconduct and issues of race. The episode has riveted the criminology community—and severed a once close relationship after one of the researchers accused his former mentor of falsifying data.

On 10 November, Justin Pickett, a criminologist at the State University of New York in Albany, announced on Twitter that he and his co-authors have agreed to retract a 2011 study published in Criminology that examined public support for taking a suspect’s ethnicity into account at sentencing. Four additional disputed papers, published between 2015 and this year in the journals Criminology, Social Problems, and Law & Society Review, have been or are in the process of being be retracted with the agreement of all the authors, ScienceInsider has learned. Eric Stewart, Pickett’s former mentor and a criminologist at Florida State University (FSU) in Tallahassee, is a co-author of all five studies.

The studies being retracted cover a range of topics. Two found that the number of black people lynched in a U.S. county 100 years ago influences whether white people in the same area today perceive black people as a threat and favor harsh punishments for them.

The quest for Magic Dirt continues? Sounds more like an attempt to blame the living for the crimes of the dead.

Another examined the role of social context in antiblack and anti-Latino sentiment in the U.S. criminal justice system.

Highlighting the insensitivity of both white and colored cops to the ancestral Negroid tradition of gimmiedat.

The upcoming retraction notice for the 2011 Criminology study—which Pickett shared with ScienceInsider—states that Stewart, the study’s second author, “identified a mistake in the way the original data were merged” while responding to concerns raised about the paper. The problems are “coding and transcription errors,” the notice says, which “collectively exceeded what the authors believed to be acceptable for a published paper.” It also notes that Pickett “disputes that the identified discrepancies are attributable to researcher error.”

Them’s fighting words! “This was not a mistake.”

Stewart did not reply to ScienceInsider’s requests for comment. (He also reportedly did not reply to the Chronicle, although the publication quoted an email that Stewart reportedly sent to FSU administrators; it stated that a co-author “essentially lynched me and my academic character”—an especially loaded phrase because Stewart is black.)

Pickett says he doesn’t regret being outspoken about the studies. “I am afraid that I have burnt many bridges, and it worries me a great deal,” he says. “I very much wish the world of science was more receptive and more kind to people who speak out about problems in published research, whether those problems result from honest error or misconduct.”

Prof. Pickett was smart to not talk to the media! That last paragraph is a quote from his article in Econ Journal Watch, March 2020. Let’s go there, because it demonstrates why he’s a hero and not just another whistleblower.

The Stewart Retractions: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis

https://econjwatch.org/articles/the-stewart-retractions-a-quantitative-and-qualitative-analysis

By Justin T. Pickett, March 2020

This study analyzes the recent retraction of five articles from three sociology
journals—Social Problems, Criminology, and Law & Society Review. Analyzing the retractions is important for several reasons:

•When you’re taking flack, you’re over the target.

Okay, that one was mine.

• The retraction notices are vague, providing little information about
what went wrong.

Pickett saw the academic Establishment covering for Stewart time and again. He could have satisfied himself with sounding an alarm that nobody would hear… but instead, he chose to be aggressive, exposing not just the fact that the papers were fraudulent, but WHY.

• The authors have continued to promote their retracted findings in
print, insisting that “the main substantive results are correct” (Law &
Society Review 2020).

Pickett is charging after the motivation for propping up that wormtongue blacktivist. He knows that Stewart is not the only problem here.

• Other articles by the authors have some of the same irregularities (e.g.,
Mears et al. 2013; Mears et al. 2017; Stewart and Simons 2010; Stewart
et al. 2006; Stewart et al. 2009), but thus far only one of these has been
corrected and none have been retracted.

Naming names! AKA personalizing the political, good. Cuckservatives fling themselves at “issues” instead of specific persons and end up shadowboxing phantoms while the perps regroup and repeat. Pickett wants lasting results!

• Examining how coauthors and journal editors respond to learning
about irregularities in articles sheds light on the sociology of science.

HE’S CALLING OUT THE COLLABORATORS IN THE JOURNALS! For academics, this is huge, seriously huge. “Publish or perish” is the coin of Academia, and Pickett is risking an industry blacklist to expose all the criminal conduct backstopping Stewart’s race-baiting lies. Pickett has legit courage!

What happened at the journals

The Committee on Public Ethics (COPE) says that journal editors should investigate when “a published article is criticised via direct email,” regardless of whether the sender is anonymous, and emphasizes that “it is important not to try to ‘out’ people who wish to be anonymous” (link). An analysis of emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveals that all of the editors were alerted in May about the data irregularities in all five of Dr. Stewart’s articles, either by an anonymous sender—“John Smith”—or by another editor.

Law & Society Review, regarding Mears et al. 2019

After receiving the anonymous email, Dr. Susan Sterett, the journal’s editor, shared it with the authors, writing: “it seems to imply pretty egregious misconduct—points 4 and 8 especially.”Then she emailed the editors of the other journals and tried to get them all on the same page. She wrote: “I would like to have a coordinated response, including possibly ignoring the email” (my emphasis). She also explained that she tried to discover the source’s identity: “I asked ‘John Smith’ to give me more information about himself and he would not.”

In July, after I posted my preprint, Dr. Sterett contacted the other editors again to reiterate her position, “I am not interested in asking for a response from the authors to an anonymous email. However, to my mind it’s worth knowing that the issue isn’t going away.” But she also explained that if any of the other editors ever decided to do anything, she wanted to be included: “I’d appreciate knowing, and I’d appreciate doing something together.”

The female instinct for unity as an end in itself, is a great tool of totalitarianism.

In late August, she contacted the other editors again, and forwarded them a discussion by Dr. Jeremy Freese of the mathematical impossibilities in the articles. In the same email, Dr. Sterett noted that she had received Dr. Gertz’s letter of support, and once more reiterated her stance on the data irregularities: “I want to treat the issue as closed unless someone wants to question the survey in detail.” Months after she closed the issue, the article was retracted at the authors’ request.

Social Problems, regarding Stewart et al. 2015 and Stewart, Johnson et al. 2019

Drs. Annulla Linders and Earl Wright, the journal’s co-editors, received an email in May from Dr. Stewart listing some of the accusations and  irregularities, and, in relation to Dr. Brown, Dr. Heathers, and Mr. Smith, asserting that “data thugs…demand data and if they do not receive it, they contact editors and universities and threaten to write blogs and tweets about the errors uncovered.”

A group of researchers who specialize in exposing bad science. That “data thugs” slur was repeated without citation in several articles that I sampled for this post.

Drs. Linders and Wright also received emails in May and July from Dr. Sterett about Dr. Stewart’s articles. The May email included a full list of the irregularities in all five articles. The co-editors did not investigate. Two weeks after they got Dr. Sterett’s second email, and two months after they received Dr. Stewart’s email, Drs. Linders and Wright received an email  from a reporter, Thomas Bartlett, asking if they were looking into the irregularities in Stewart et al. (2019). They replied, “no question concerning this paper has been brought to our attention.” Before replying to the reporter, however, Dr. Wright wrote to Dr. Linders: “a writer from the Chronicle of Higher Education is sniffing around. Is the paper he cites below the one inquired into by the ‘data thugs?’ Of course, I won’t respond until we get a plan together.”

Conclusion and Recommendations

Scientific fraud occurs all too frequently—approximately 1 in 50 scientists admit to fabricating or falsifying data (Fanelli 2009)—and I believe it is the most likely explanation for the data irregularities in the five retracted articles. Dr. Stewart’s current claim about the source of the 2013 survey differs from his previous claim and from what the survey firm’s owner and director have said. His claim about the number of 2008 samples also differs from the director’s account. When asked for the 2008 data, Dr. Stewart claimed he destroyed the original file, even though FSU officials said not to change it. More generally, many aspects of the data and findings are impossible, and others are so implausible or improbable as to be preposterous.

None of the editors followed COPE’s guidelines when alerted to the irregularities in Dr. Stewart’s articles. One editor seemingly tried to coordinate a collective response of ignoring the allegations, even though she recognized their potential seriousness. At two journals, the editors sought the whistleblower’s identity. I believe that it is possible that one or more of the editors would have revealed the whistleblower’s identity had they discovered it. For instance, email correspondence reveals that Dr. Johnson kept Dr. Stewart up to date on what his co-editors knew and were doing, even after officially recusing himself from the matter. Not a single editor started an investigation in response to the anonymous allegations. Dr. Linders explained her reluctance to take those allegations seriously:

“At this point, especially since the person complaining would not come forward, I assumed this was something along the lines of the scientific version of complaints about ‘fake news’ (now ‘fake science’). If you cannot verify the credibility of the source, how can you trust the information?”

Textbook managerialism. How can anything good come from a non-certified-compliant source?

I esteem Prof. Pickett for having the integrity to verify his own work, the courage to oppose a former mentor in pursuit of the truth, and to follow the trail to collaborators embedded in the very journals that serve as academia’s gatekeepers, over years of effort, and never settling for ‘good enough’.