Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina, best known on The Vault as the original home of the Parapsychology Laboratory, one of the most significant institutions in the history of Parapsychology.
Founding
Duke University traces its origins to Trinity College, founded in 1838, and took its present name in 1924 following a major benefaction from tobacco and electric power industrialist James Buchanan Duke.
The founding of the Parapsychology Laboratory
In January 1927, psychologist William McDougall, previously chair of psychology at Harvard, resigned that position to become Duke's inaugural Professor and Chair of Psychology, tasked with building the university's newly established psychology department from the ground up. McDougall had a long-standing personal interest in psychical research, having previously served as president of both the Society for Psychical Research (1920–21) and the American Society for Psychical Research (1921), and he set out from the start to integrate parapsychological inquiry into the department's academic agenda, despite prevailing scientific scepticism toward the subject.
In 1928, McDougall recruited botanist J. B. Rhine to the department, initially to assist with unrelated experiments on inheritance in animals. With McDougall's encouragement and departmental support, Rhine's research soon shifted decisively toward psychical research, and by around 1930 the two had established what became the Parapsychology Laboratory. McDougall and Rhine went on to co-found the Journal of Parapsychology together in 1937, the year before McDougall's death.
Later history
The Parapsychology Laboratory continued operating at Duke under Rhine's direction until 1965, when Rhine reached the university's mandatory retirement age and left to establish an independent successor organisation, the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, later renamed the Rhine Research Center. Duke University itself has had no formal affiliation with parapsychological research since that departure.
In 1957, in recognition of McDougall's role in founding the field at Duke, the Parapsychology Laboratory established the McDougall Award for Distinguished Work in Parapsychology.