Jul 04, 2013 12:14 PM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

The University of New Mexico (UNM) said it will discipline the professor who dug himself into deep trouble with a fat-shaming tweet and claiming it was research, the Associated Press reported.

Geoffrey Miller, a UNM professor of Psychology published the tweet on Tuesday, later deleted it, apologized for it and claimed it was part of a research project. The school has since said it was not part of any project and that they would begin a disciplinary investigation.

"Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn't have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won't have the willpower to do a dissertation #truth," the tweet read.

In a press release posted to the school's website, the UNM Institutional Review Board (IRB) said "Miller's tweets were self-promotional in nature and did not fol­low research cri­te­ria which require spe­cific research ques­tions or hypothe­ses, sys­tem­atic meth­ods for col­lec­tion quan­ti­ta­tive and/or qual­i­ta­tive data and cri­te­ria for select­ing respon­dents."

The release also stated that Miller's future at UNM and at New York University (NYU), where he is a visiting professor this summer, is unclear.

According to Bloomberg Businessweek, NYU's IRB stated Miller never submitted a research proposal, but included he would not have needed one since his "project" did not include human subjects.

Miller will keep his summer appointment with NYU, which ends on Aug. 31, but his future with UNM is not clear.

Since posting the harsh comment, Miller deleted the tweet and followed up with an apology saying his words were "idiotic, impulsive, and badly judged." Shortly after that, he made his account private.

If Miller were conducting an IRB-approved research project, his words or actions could have conceivably been protected by academic freedom. Because UNM's review board did not give him such approval, he is subject to any disciplinary action the school may hand down.

San Francisco Law School professor Sondra Solovay told InsideHigherEd.com that Miller could also face legal trouble. She said his tweet violates the Americans with Disabilities Act because his words did not consider those whose obesity is attributed to medical issues.

"Here Geoffrey Miller has displayed prejudice and profound misconceptions about the causes of weight. This raises questions of discrimination related to students or employees that he supervised or had any influence over," Solovay said in an e-mail. "The subsequent deception about there being a research purpose to the hurtful comment adds insult to injury."

Solovay also said UNM could feel the legal ramifications as well.

"The reputation damage affects the whole university," Solovay said. "You want to feel like your professors are not acting from a place of bias. And if a faculty or staff member makes people question that, then that's not an easy thing to get back."

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