Founding as an Independent Foundation

J. B. Rhine anticipated years in advance that Duke University's mandatory retirement rules would eventually force him out of the psychology department that housed his parapsychology laboratory, and rather than risk the program's closure he began, in 1962, to organize an independent nonprofit corporation, the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, that could hold its own endowment and continue the work outside any single university's control. The Foundation drew crucial early financial support from private benefactors, most notably Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography and founder of the Xerox Corporation, whose gifts helped secure the new organization's long term independence.

When Rhine reached Duke's retirement age in 1965 the transition plan he had spent three years preparing took effect: the laboratory's remaining endowment, library, case archive and much of its research staff moved off the Duke campus into the Foundation, which structured its activities through two divisions, the Institute for Parapsychology for experimental research and the Parapsychology Press for publishing, while continuing the Journal of Parapsychology that the Duke laboratory had run since 1937. The move preserved four decades of accumulated data and methodology at a moment when many observers expected American academic parapsychology to disappear along with its founder's university position.