Pioneer Fund Assets Divided; New Leadership Appointed

In October 2012, Jean-Philippe Rushton, a Canadian psychology professor and probably the most important race scientist in North America, died of cancer. At the time of his death, Rushton was running the Pioneer Fund, a grant-making entity founded in the 1930s by Americans with Nazi sympathies. In recent decades, Pioneer has been the only major foundation devoted to subsidizing race science and eugenics research, areas of science that are now fully discredited.

Under Rushton, the Pioneer Fund gave out very few grants, concentrating its disbursements on prominent race scientists such as Jared Taylor of the white nationalist group, American Renaissance. Rushton also headed the Charles Darwin Research Institute, located in Port Huron, Mich., an online outfit that distributed his racist research. Rushton’s most infamous study concluded that brain and genital size were inversely related, suggesting that black people are less intelligent than whites and more highly sexualized. Sometime in the last year, the website for the Charles Darwin Research Institute went offline.

For most of the last year, the Pioneer Fund’s website provided no indication that Rushton had passed away nor did it register any information about who was in change of the group. Messages left by Hatewatch at the fund’s phone number over the last year have not been returned.

But some time in mid-2013, a notice was posted on the website about what was happening at Pioneer. It said that in August 2012, Rushton transferred half the assets of the Pioneer Fund to his Charles Darwin Research Institute. The website also said that Rushton had resigned before his death as president of the fund and nominated Richard Lynn as his successor.

Lynn is a professor emeritus in psychology at the University of Ulster whose personal webpage lists as interests sex and race differences and eugenics (the “science,” much admired by the German Nazis, of selectively breeding human beings to create “better” people). He runs his own outfit, the Ulster Institute for Social Research, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in Pioneer grants over the years. The institute appears to be primarily an online effort and is registered to an address near London.

The Pioneer website said that Rushton had left the Charles Darwin Research Institute in the control of his son, Stephen Rushton, an associate professor of education at the University of South Florida. The younger Rushton had served on Pioneer’s board for several years. The Pioneer Fund website further said that Rushton had done so “in the expectation that his son would support research of the kind,” meaning race science, “that had been supported by the Pioneer Fund.” The website said that Stephen Rushton had then “transferred the assets of the Charles Darwin Research Institute to the JSP Education Foundation (JSP stands for John Stephen Philippe).” Lynn and Rushton were listed as contacts for the fund.

Attempts to contact Lynn about his plans for the Pioneer Fund’s remaining monies were ignored. But Stephen Rushton did reply to an E-mail from Hatewatch, saying that he did not belong on Pioneer’s page as a contact as “my father, John (not Jean) passed away a year ago at which point I withdrew being on the Foundation.” He directed Hatewatch to Lynn.

Rushton would not answer questions about whether he received Pioneer Fund money as a result of being handed the Charles Darwin Research Institute nor would he discuss the JSP Education Foundation or his plans for it. Since Hatewatch contacted Rushton, the Pioneer Fund website has removed all reference to the JSP Education Foundation and deleted the statement that Jean-Philippe Rushton wanted his son to support race science research just as the fund had.