To use all functions of this page, please activate cookies in your browser.
my.bionity.com
With an accout for my.bionity.com you can always see everything at a glance – and you can configure your own website and individual newsletter.
- My watch list
- My saved searches
- My saved topics
- My newsletter
Pioneer Fund
The Pioneer Fund is a U.S. non-profit foundation established in 1937. It is currently headed by psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton. Its stated purpose is "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences." The fund focuses on projects it perceives will not be easily funded due to controversial subject matter. Two of the Pioneer Fund's most notable recipients are the Minnesota Twin Family Study and the Texas Adoption Project, which studied the similarities and differences of identical twins and other children adopted into non-biological families. The Pioneer Fund has been one of the main sources of funding for the partly-genetic hypothesis of IQ variation among races. Their funding and publications have generated controversy since the 1994 publication of The Bell Curve, which drew heavily from Pioneer-funded research. The fund has also received criticism for its perceived stance on eugenics.[1] The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil rights advocacy organization, has characterized the Pioneer Fund as a hate group.[2] The SPLC cites the Pioneer Fund's funding of some organizations and individuals the SPLC considers racist.[3] It has also been criticized by some scientists and journalists, and in various peer-reviewed academic articles.[4] . Ulric Neisser, who was the chairman of the American Psychological Association's (APA) 1995 taskforce on intelligence research, has said, "Pioneer has sometimes sponsored useful research - research that otherwise might not have been done at all. By that reckoning, I would give it a weak plus."[5] Additional recommended knowledge
Early historyThe Pioneer Fund was incorporated on March 11, 1937. The first five directors were:
The 1937 incorporation documents of the Pioneer Fund list two purposes. The first, modeled on the Nazi Lebensborn breeding program,[12] was aimed at encouraging the propagation of those "descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States and/or from related stocks, or to classes of children, the majority of whom are deemed to be so descended". Its second purpose was to support academic research and the "dissemination of information, into the 'problem of heredity and eugenics'" and "the problems of race betterment".[11] The Pioneer Fund argues the "race betterment" has always referred to the "human race" referred to earlier in the sentence, and critics argue it referred to racial groups. The document was amended in 1985 and the phrase changed to "human race betterment." The Pioneer Fund supported the distribution of a eugenics film titled Erbkrank ("Hereditary Defective" or "Hereditary Illness") which was published by the pre-war 1930s Nazi Party. William Draper obtained the film from the predecessor to the Nazi Office of Racial Policy (Rassenpolitisches Amt) prior to the founding of the Pioneer Fund.[8] According to the Pioneer Fund site, all founders capable of doing so participated in the war against the Nazis.[13] Draper secretly met Dr. C. Nash Herndon of Bowman Gray School of Medicine at Wake Forest University in 1949. Little is known about their meetings, but Herndon was playing a major role in the expansion of the compulsory sterilization program in North Carolina.[14] In the 1950s and 1960s Draper supported two government committees that gave grants for genetics research. Harry F. Weyher, Jr. was his lawyer. The committee members included Representative Francis E. Walter (chair of the House Un-American Activities Committee), Henry E. Garrett (an educator known for his belief in the genetic inferiority of blacks), and Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi.[15] Subsequent directors included:[13]
Current fundingMost of the Pioneer Fund's grants go to scientific research, including to researchers at 38 universities, and a smaller amount has gone to political or legal organizations, mostly to immigration reform/reduction organizations. This section's figures are from 1971-1996 and are adjusted to 1997 USD.[16] Scientific researchMany of the researchers whose findings support the hereditarian hypothesis of racial IQ disparity have received grants of varying sizes from the Pioneer Fund.[17] Large grantees, in order of amount received, are
Other notable recipients of funding include:
Note that the fund has only funded some of their research, not necessarily their most important contributions. Political and legal fundingThe Fund has given support to immigration reductionist organizations, primarily to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), but also to the American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF), and ProjectUSA. During the campaign over California's Proposition 187 critics claimed that the Pioneer Fund was channeling money in favor of the initiative through contributions to the FAIR.[20] A minor grantee is the paleoconservative and white nationalist journalist Jared Taylor, the editor of American Renaissance and a member the advisory board of the white nationalist publication the Occidental Quarterly.[3] Many of the key academic white nationalists in both Right Now! and American Renaissance have been funded by the Pioneer Fund, which was also directly involved in funding the parent organization of American Renaissance, the New Century Foundation.[17] ControversyCriticismIn addition to the funding and the connections to persons and organizations mentioned above, there are reported links between various past contributors to the science journal receiving funding from Pioneer Mankind Quarterly and Nazism. Italian biologist and Mankind Quarterly associate editor Corrado Gini authored an article titled "The Scientific Basis of Fascism" and was once a scientific advisor to Mussolini. The editorial board member Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer was Josef Mengele's mentor before and during the Holocaust and is suspected of being his collaborator.[21][22][23] The already mentioned Roger Pearson was a former editor. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit organization, lists the Pioneer Fund as a hate group citing the fund's history, its funding of race and intelligence research, and its connections with some individuals they feel are racist.[24] They also state: "Race science has potentially frightening consequences, as is evident not only from the horrors of Nazi Germany, but also from the troubled racial history of the United States. If white supremacist groups had their way, the United States would return to its dark days. In publication after publication, hate groups are using this "science" to legitimize racial hatred. In Calling Our Nation, the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations publishes a piece by a New York psychologist surveying the work of Jensen, Garrett and numerous others. National Vanguard, the publication of former physics professor William Pierce (see The Alliance and its Allies) and his neo-Nazi National Alliance, runs a similar piece that concludes that "it is the Negro's deficiency ... which kept him in a state of savagery in his African environment and is now undermining the civilization of a racially mixed America."[25] In accord with the tax regulations governing nonprofit corporations, Pioneer does not fund individuals; under the law only other nonprofit organizations are appropriate grantees. As a consequence, many of the fund's awards go not to the researchers themselves but to the universities that employ them, a standard procedure for supporting work by academically based scientists. In addition to these awards to the universities where its grantees are based, Pioneer has made a number of grants to other nonprofit organizations, corporations some feel have been created to channel resources to a particular academic recipient while circumventing the institution where the researcher is employed.[26][27] In 2002, William H. Tucker criticized the Pioneer's grant-funding techniques: "Pioneer's administrative procedures are as unusual as its charter. Although the fund typically gives away more than half a million dollars per year, there is no application form or set of guidelines. Instead, according to Weyher, an applicant merely submits 'a letter containing a brief description of the nature of the research and the amount of the grant requested.' There is no requirement for peer review of any kind; Pioneer's board of directors—two attorneys, two engineers, and an investment broker—decides, sometimes within a day, whether a particular research proposal merits funding. Once the grant has been made, there is no requirement for an interim or final report or even for an acknowledgment by a grantee that Pioneer has been the source of support, all atypical practices in comparison to other organizations that support scientific research."[28] Rushton, the current head, has spoken at conferences of the American Renaissance magazine, in which he has also published articles.[3] Anti-racist Searchlight Magazine described one of these as a "veritable 'who’s who' of American white supremacy."[4]. The Pioneer Fund was described by the London Sunday Telegraph (3/12/89) as a "neo-Nazi organization closely integrated with the far right in American politics." Responses to criticismsThe Pioneer Fund's history after its 1937 incorporation focused on improving hereditary characteristics, which at the time was pursued through the scholarly field eugenics. The scientific community had enthusiasm for what they saw as the promise of eugenics, and most developed nations employed some form of it, most commonly compulsory sterilization of those considered to have incurable hereditary diseases. High school and college textbooks from the 1920s through the 40s often had chapters touting the scientific progress to be had from applying eugenic principles to the population. Following World War II, however, eugenics became associated with the brutal policies of the Nazis and fell out of favour. In addition to this historical focus of the Pioneer Fund, some of the fund's previous members and grantees, including its main founder Wickliffe Preston Draper, have supported ideas such as racial segregation. The fund's administrators state that any criticism should be directed at these past individuals, not the entire organization, which funds much notable scientific work. The fund claims that it holds no political position or any inappropriate bias in choosing grantees. Pioneer supports research some consider controversial; for example, the study of the disparity between racial groups in average cognitive ability test scores (race and intelligence). Such studies examine the genetic and environmental factors underlying these group differences. The Pioneer Fund has stated that it rejects racism, and has claimed that it is the victim of smear campaigns waged by those who consider a discussion of race to be taboo. In addition, it has asserted that the majority of the criticism directed at the Fund falls into such categories as to make it more-appropriately directed at individuals than at an organization as a whole.[citation needed] The Fund writes on their website that one should consider the historical context surrounding such beliefs, as many mainstream scientists of the first half the twentieth century supported racialist views seen by some as politically incorrect today. They say that Wickliffe Draper's views on race do not influence decisions made by the Fund today. Charles Murray, co-author of the Bell Curve, addressed the fund's history in response to criticism of it: "[T]he relationship between the founder of the Pioneer Fund and today's Pioneer Fund is roughly analogous to the relationship between Henry Ford and today's Ford Foundation."[29] In the 1920s, Henry Ford authored anti-Semitic literature. Behavioral geneticist David T. Lykken wrote "If you can find me some rich villains that want to contribute to my research - Qaddafi, the Mafia, whoever - the worse they are, the better I'll like it. I'm doing a social good by taking their money... Any money of theirs that I spend in a legitimate and honorable way, they can't spend in a dishonorable way"[30] Science writer Morton Hunt received Pioneer funding for his book and wrote: "One could spend hundreds of pages on the pros and cons of the case of the Pioneer Fund, but what matters to me—and should matter to my readers—is that I have been totally free to research and write as I chose. I alerted Pioneer to my political views when making the grant proposal for this book but its directors never blinked."[31] Notes
References
See also
Scholarly studies
Pro
|
|||
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Pioneer_Fund". A list of authors is available in Wikipedia. |