Duke University

Duke University began in 1838 as a one-room subscription school organized by Methodist and Quaker communities in rural North Carolina, moved and grew under a series of names, and took the name Trinity College in 1859 under the sponsorship of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Trinity relocated to Durham in 1892 at the invitation of tobacco and textile money, and in 1924 James Buchanan Duke, whose family had built a fortune in tobacco and hydroelectric power, endowed the institution with a trust that renamed it Duke University in memory of his father, on the condition that it expand into a full research university with graduate and professional schools.

The Methodist connection was never severed outright; Duke Divinity School continues to train clergy, predominantly for the United Methodist Church, and the university's Gothic chapel remains its architectural and ceremonial center. But the 1924 transformation deliberately built a modern research university on top of the older denominational college, and it is that research infrastructure, not the divinity school, that gave Duke its distinctive place in the history of the study of religion: a psychology department willing, in the 1930s, to house a research program that mainstream psychology regarded with open skepticism.

The botanist J. B. Rhine and his wife Louisa followed the psychologist William McDougall to Duke in 1927 and 1928, and by 1930 Rhine had begun a program of card-guessing and dice experiments intended to test extrasensory perception and psychokinesis under controlled, statistically analyzed conditions, a deliberate break from the seance-room methods of earlier psychical research. His 1934 book Extra-Sensory Perception popularized the term and made Duke, for several decades, the recognized center of experimental parapsychology in the United States, formalized as the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory in 1935 and given a peer-reviewed outlet in the Journal of Parapsychology from 1937.

Rhine reached Duke's mandatory retirement age in 1965 and, rather than let the program close with him, founded an independent nonprofit, the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, which took the laboratory's records and continued its work outside the university; it was renamed the Rhine Research Center in 1995, the centenary of Rhine's birth, and still operates in Durham today as a body legally and financially separate from Duke, though closely identified with it in the public memory of the field. Duke's own psychology department no longer runs an active parapsychology program, and the university's relationship to the subject today is historical, the place where a controversial research tradition first tried to make itself into an experimental science.