American Society for Psychical Research

Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page - there's a petition to the New York Charities Bureau calling on them to take action over the state of affairs at the ASPR. Please sign it to try to get some action taken:
http://chng.it/vZTGNxD4VL

(Perhaps users of Skeptiko would also like to sign it if someone can post the details there.)

While I was happy to sign and publicise the petition, I do wonder what efforts have been made through the usual channels to alert the Charities Bureau to the problem. After all, regulatory bodies don't usually insist on a petition before investigating. The Bureau does have a standard complaint form that can be used to alert them to "1) wrongdoing by such organizations; 2) fraudulent or misleading solicitation and improper expenditure of money for charitable purposes; and 3) improper activities of executors, administrators, trustees and personal representatives responsible for honoring gifts or bequests to a charity." The concerns about ASPR would clearly be covered by the third category:
https://www.charitiesnys.com/complaints_new.html

Keane is in control of the charity... her salary and benefits are not excessive, and she doesn’t appear to have embezzled or misdirected fund’s improperly. So she’s not very effective... so what...? no crime there.

it’s an easy thing to do to use a charity to do this. As long as you ain’t getting funds in some improper way... it’s completely legal... only the board and members can do anything about this... and Keane seems to be looking after that side of things... else she wouldn’t still be there.

As long as she paces herself, and doesn’t get greedy... she has a very good income available to her until the end of her life. She appears to keep her head down staying out of the limelight. 

Nowt to be done. That’s the world we live in.

I'm afraid I don't understand that. One of the links posted by ersby above shows that for one year (2005) her compensation/benefits amounted to over $158,000, with nearly $19,000 expenses on top of that.

For a charity that's not performing its intended functions, the expenses alone seem huge. The compensation/benefits are something like four times the average salary. How can that not be excessive, if she's not doing anything detectable in return?

She would have to be doing something irregular. Not being effective in her job is not irregular. Neither is a 6 figure dollar salary in New York, pretty standard for higher jobs. Just because we don’t like how she’s running the organisation, is not a cause for the New York AG to get involved. What the AG is looking for is clear cases of embezzlement. I.e. charity pays 1 million a year for insurance which should only cost 10k, whistle blower (or board/members) comes forward with evidence to show the 999k balance is being kicked back to the chief exec of the charity. The major concern is assets... ie an asset is sold below value to third party, third party pays the balance directly to chief exec. The AG is really not interested in how a charity is otherwise run.

This is what the Bureau says on its website:
"An investigation is conducted in those cases in which there is reliable evidence of a misuse of charitable assets or mismanagement resulting in a significant financial loss to the charity." [my emphasis]
https://www.charitiesnys.com/faqs_complaints_new.html

There's more on the sad recent history of the Society from Tom Ruffles, in the form of a review of a book entitled "Far Out in the New Age," self-published by Robert McConnell, the first president of the Parapsychological Association, in 1995:
https://tomruffles.wordpress.com/2019/11...mcconnell/

The book deals in part with what went wrong at the Society in the early 1990s. Ruffles comments:

McConnell’s book is still pertinent as it contains the first sustained exposure of the rot that has afflicted the ASPR for the past quarter of a century and seen the decline of that once-impressive organisation to its moribund state today.  In fact, it is shocking to realise quite how long the situation has been going on, largely unchallenged.  McConnell identified a number of factors which have brought the Society to its knees.  These include the ‘anti-science’ New Age bent of some of its leaders, seeking to reorient its focus; consequently, active efforts to limit the number of professional parapsychologists on the board, thereby marginalising the scientific approach to the subject; straightforward financial mismanagement; a cessation of activities, causing membership to decline; and (not emphasised but evident) in general the woeful passivity of those who were in a position to fight against the blatant take-over by a faction which did not have the ASPR’s best interests at heart, but failed to do so energetically.

He spends some time on the astonishingly generous remuneration package awarded to the Executive Director largely thanks to the enthusiasm of the president, despite her manifest lack of qualifications for the post.  The consequences hang round the Society’s neck like an albatross to this day.  Sadly, those trustees who at the time protested at the course the Society was taking were easily outmanoeuvred.  McConnell presciently characterised what was going on within the ASPR as ‘a process analogous to a leveraged corporate takeover – with one bizarre twist: the “golden parachute” is for the incoming manager’ (i.e. Keane).

The SPR Facebook page highlights another worrying development - someone is advertising for sale on Abebooks a collection of 85 original documents described as "ARCHIVE OF EARLY CORRESPONDENCE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH":
https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookD...0563415330

From a quick look, this appears to be correspondence addressed to the Society, so presumably it comes from the Society's archives. How it came into the bookseller's hands isn't explained.

Tom Ruffles has written a new blog post: The American Society for Psychical Research: Recent Developments

[Laird]

And Tom Ruffles has now written another blog post, encouraging those who have not yet done so to sign the petition, which has stalled at just over half of the 1,000 signatures sought: The American Society for Psychical Research: Action Required