This
may seem a surprising statement from someone who has been involved with the
Society for Psychical Research (SPR) for nearly 30 years, many of those as a
Council member. My affection for the
Society and my commitment to its aims have not wavered, but I am concerned that
the enormous sum bequeathed by Mr Nigel Buckmaster is not being used as wisely
as it might, and I am not confident that any money I might leave would be used wisely
either.
In
what follows I must stress that I am not divulging any privileged information
gleaned through SPR Council meetings.
Matters discussed within them are confidential, and although that principle
has not always been honoured by some Council members, I feel I should restrict
myself to what has appeared in the public domain – or can be deduced from it. The necessity for deduction is because the
official communications have not always been terribly explicit about how money
will be used; you would think that there was some embarrassment about it
judging by the lack of detail in the Society’s various announcements. There is still enough information available to
allow me to express my disquiet at some of the things that have occurred since
the Buckmaster funds began flowing into the SPR’s coffers.
Exactly
a year ago I wrote a couple of blog posts about the Buckmaster bequest, as a result of the
publication of the SPR’s 2012-13 Annual
Report and Statement of Accounts.
Now that the 2013-14 Report and Accounts (the reporting period ends on
30 September) are available, it is possible to see what further information has
been supplied on the matters I wrote about then. Buckmaster is prominent in the Report,
starting with outgoing president Dr Richard Broughton in his own report
alluding to the difficulties encountered within Council in deciding what to do
with the money. Unfortunately the
Accounts feel very short on detail, and while they are acceptable to the
auditors and other official bodies, the interested member might struggle to
determine exactly how some of the Society’s resources are being expended.
In
addition to the reference in his presidential section in the 2013-14 Annual
Report Dr Broughton, who also chairs the Buckmaster Oversight Committee (BOC), contributes
the BOC’s first annual report. In it he
briefly lists the four elements of the ‘Buckmaster project’: 1) the online encyclopaedia/books/website
upgrade; 2) ‘a research and publication project to develop Systems Methodology
as a new tool especially suited to the investigation of spontaneous cases’; 3)
‘updating and upgrading the Lexscien online library’; and 4) the creation of an
online open data repository. What is
left goes into a building fund in the hope of finding a freehold property at
some point.
Some
of the Buckmaster initiatives are to be admired, though it might be felt that
more money is being spent on them than should be necessary (some £350,000 on
the publishing programme, for example).
In particular, even though the earlier CaseBase proposal promoted by David and Julie
Rousseau, which was to gather a collection of what are considered to be the
best paradigm-challenging cases,
had been withdrawn because it was so controversial, leading to the
formation of the BOC, David Rousseau (the Society’s Hon. Treasurer) and Julie
Rousseau, also a Council member, seem to loom large in the disbursement of the
Buckmaster money.
One
sum that went to them – or rather their organisation C-FAR, the Centre for
Fundamental and Anomalies Research – was £11,600 for the updating and upgrading
of the Lexscien online library, which among other publications houses the SPR’s
Proceedings and Journal back to 1882 (item 3 on Dr Broughton’s list of Buckmaster
projects). There had been embarrassing
complaints about the online library’s usability for some time which reflected
badly on the SPR, and it also stopped at 2008.
The new money will allow it to be brought up to date, but it does seem
to be a huge amount of money to support a database that also brings in
subscription money to C-FAR from non-SPR members. A useful comparator is Marc Demarest’s IAPSOP database, which is
growing at a phenomenal pace and houses far more content than the relatively
static Lexscien. IAPSOP is clearly done
for love by volunteers, Lexscien is a more hard-headed enterprise. C-FAR by the way does not itself seem to do
much research as an organisation, despite its title (though I am happy to be
corrected), but it does appear to be a registered company so must be handy for
tax purposes.
Number
2 on Dr Broughton’s list is the Systems Methodology project, which Dr
Broughton’s report specifies is being conducted by Dr Rousseau. C-FAR was given £26,000 for this purpose, and
as it is a neat third of the £78,000 noted in the SPR Buckmaster announcement
of 24 March 2014, it is not difficult to figure out that this is the first of
three tranches of £26,000 being paid to Dr Rousseau. The total amount he is receiving, £78,000,
seems clear, but not what he is doing for the money, which is nowhere
elaborated. What can be said with
certainty is that despite the Systems Methodology project grant to Dr Rousseau
being a grant for a project, it is not as one might have expected administered
by the SPR’s Research Grants Committee (RGC), even though one would normally
expect such an application to be made to them rather than direct to the BOC,
and there is no indication that the BOC would entertain other grant
applications.
I
have previously noted that the annual sum paid to Dr Rousseau is completely out
of scale with the average RGC award.
This year (2013-14) the RGC awarded a mere four grants ranging from £750
to £3,300, averaging £2,050 per applicant.
There were in addition seven grants awarded by the Society’s Survival
Research Committee, ranging from three of £1,000 to one of £4,500, the seven averaging
£2,663. The total amount awarded to all
eleven by both committees comes to £26,842.87, only slightly more than awarded
to Dr Rousseau alone in the same year. The
£78,000 to be given to Dr Rousseau, something like a tenth of the Buckmaster
bequest, is totally unlike the grants normally given to applicants. That must be some Systems Methodology. What can it possibly contain that is worth so
much? Half way through the 2014-15
reporting year and we are still none the wiser.
Finally,
there is one item glaringly missing from the 2013-14 Report: any reference to
the Research Activities Committee (RAC), which Dr Rousseau chaired, but which showed
little sign of life in recent years apart from the promotion of the CaseBase
project (as can be seen from Dr Rousseau’s notes as chair in previous Annual
Reports). I am particularly sorry to see
it disappear because I was on Robert Morris’s steering group that resulted
in the RAC’s formation in 1992. Anybody
wishing to see what the RAC was intended to do should read Professor Bernard
Carr’s article written when he was its chair, ‘Research Activities in the SPR:
New Initiatives’, which appeared in the SPR’s Paranormal Review in January 1999.
The committee had a wide remit, but this languished under Dr Rousseau’s
chairmanship, and it is now no more. The
cynic might think that, the CaseBase initiative having been shelved, the RAC
had fulfilled its function and was of no further interest to Dr Rousseau. I’m sure it is a coincidence but the
conjunction is unfortunate in terms of perception. Anyway, it would have been nice to see some
mention of its demise in the Annual Report, but the loss of a committee
specifically dealing with research activities is not something one would
necessarily wish to draw attention to as it suggests a certain poverty of ideas
and lack of vigour.
To
sum up, I had intended to leave money to the SPR. Not on the scale of Nigel Buckmaster
admittedly, but an amount nonetheless. I
shall certainly not do so now, because of the way I feel that the Buckmaster
money is being so poorly utilised. This
is not my opinion alone. I know of a
couple of SPR members who feel the same way, and will not remember the SPR in
their wills. That is money that would
have come in over the next few decades which will instead go to other
homes. The Society has done very well
from legacies in the past, and they have got the organisation through some
tough periods when outgoings otherwise outstripped income. But times change, the profile of the
membership has changed with them, and it cannot be assumed that legacies will
always flow in as they have in the past.
If potential donors see that money is being frittered, they will look
elsewhere. There are many competing
causes, and some who would once have considered putting the SPR in their wills
could decide that other charities, such as Cancer Research, or the Alzheimer’s
Society, will be more likely to use their money wisely. That is what I am going to be doing.
