Richard Alpert was an assistant professor at Harvard who, with Timothy Leary, ran the Harvard Psilocybin Project (Harvard Crimson, 1962). In a May 1963 letter to Harvard’s president he dated the Harvard-affiliated work from autumn 1960 to the end of 1962 and described over four hundred subjects (Alpert’s letter, 1963).
He argued that the experimenter must take the drug with the subject and that expectations and surroundings shaped the results (Harvard Crimson, May 1963), ideas that fed into the phrase “set and setting”. On 27 May 1963 President Pusey announced that the Harvard Corporation had ended Alpert’s appointment for giving a hallucinogenic drug to an undergraduate, against an agreement with the university; the Crimson called it the first dismissal in Pusey’s ten years (Harvard Crimson, 1963).
Alpert later took the name Ram Dass; a 2010 paper on the Harvard affair is titled with both names (Wark and Galliher, 2010). His later spiritual teaching falls outside this glossary, which follows the research record. The studies he took part in would not meet today’s ethics standards.
Sources
- Harvard Crimson, 9 July 1963
- Alpert’s letter to Pusey, Harvard Crimson, 1963
- Alpert Asks Freedom for Drug Studies, Harvard Crimson, 1963
- Wark and Galliher, 2010
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