Research grant from alleged racist group stirs controversy

Officials are defending the University's research guidelines in light of controversy surrounding a grant received from an alleged white supremacist foundation. University alumnus Harlan Girard asked the University Board of Trustees this summer to look into a $6,500 grant to Associate Regional Science Professor Daniel Vining by the Pioneer Fund to study population growth. According to Girard, the private, non-profit foundation supports racist research. Various members of the academic community have also accused the foundation of supporting research based on Nazi ideology and racist theories. At the request of University President Judith Rodin, Vice Provost for Research Barry Cooperman looked into the matter, but found no evidence of wrongdoing by the University. Cooperman said the University does not impose ethical tests on its sources of research funding at any point in the review process. "It is very hard to define a threshold of ethics that would be uniform across a variety of research projects," Rodin said. In a letter to the Trustees, Rodin said that applying ethical tests to these research grants would limit the freedom of academic pursuits. "Penn has always maintained that the freedom of inquiry is the foundation of a great university," Rodin said. "Therefore, the University does not restrict the freedom of individual faculty members or students to pursue research activities," she added. "Even though its leadership or the vast majority of its faculty and students rightly disapprove of the stated goals of their funding sources." According to Cooperman, Vining's research and the conditions of the 1992 grant were appropriate under University policies and procedures. "The general rule goes as follows: If it is a legal organization, we will accept grants and gifts provided that they meet our standards," Cooperman said. These standards include maintaining that projects do not discriminate against persons, that they guarantee "freedom of inquiry and publication" and that they meet other academic policies of the University. The controversy surrounding the Pioneer Fund surfaced earlier this year when a book published by sociologist Stefan Kuhl stated that the group promotes eugenic racism --an idea that the human race can be improved by eliminating its "negative" traits through controlled selective breeding. Historian Barry Mehler, the leading critic of the foundation, said in an interview that eugenicists typically measure the value of human beings on a biological scale. "Eugenicists believe that every human being is a genetic code," Mehler said. "What you have is a generic kind of racism which separates the human race into two groups -- the superior and the inferior." A memorandum issued by the Pioneer Fund in June denied racism claims against them. It further stated that the purpose of the organization is to "conduct or aid in conducting study and research into the problems of heredity and eugenics in the human race generally?and into the problems of human race betterment with special reference to the people of the United States." According to Kuhl, the Pioneer Fund's original 1937 charter stated that the foundation aimed to "improve the character of the people of the United States" by encouraging the procreation of "white persons who settled in the original 13 states prior to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States." Pioneer Fund President Harry Weyher said the five-man foundation board amended the charter in 1985, removing the word "white" from several clauses. Vining, who has received between $100,000 and $150,000 from the foundation with the University's approval since the early '80s, said he was unaware of the controversy surrounding the organization until this month. "They never have bothered me, saying that I have to do research in one direction or the other," he added. "[Still] I would rather not be involved with them." Vining has not received money from the fund since 1992. That gift allowed him to study the relationship between intelligence and birth rates of different ethnic groups in Israel.