Harvard, LSD, and the 1960s

According to Don Lattin’s The Harvard Psychedelic Club (HarperCollins, $24.99), which goes on sale today, there was apparently a time at Harvard when it was perfectly hunky-dory for professors to give LSD to their students—for purely scientific purposes, of course.

Needless to say, Harvard is a much different place these days, when the only things our professors give us are lower participation grades and holier-than-thou frowns when our cell phones go off in class. Sigh.

But back in the 1960s—when guys seemed averse to razors and grooming, girls were banished to Radcliffe Yard, and students of both genders stormed into University Hall to protest whatever they felt like protesting—the Harvard Psilocybin Project was in full swing [see correction below]. The project, which involved administering psilocybin (a consciousness-expanding drug) to research subjects, brought together Timothy Leary, Huston Smith, Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass), and former Crimson editor Andrew T. Weil ’63, four men who became major players in the counterculture movement and, as Lattin claims, "killed the fifities and ushered in a new age for America.”

But the often forgotten presence of Harvard in this wild and crazy chapter of American history is really something. According to a review in the San Francisco Chronicle, Lattin’s book indicates that then-University President Nathan M. Pusey's '28 decision to fire Alpert and Leary essentially mandated that San Francisco (where the pair headed after leaving dainty old Cambridge) would be the holy seat of counterculture.

The review also speculates that it was Weil's reporting that first brought Pusey's attention to the Harvard Psilocybin Project. If that's true, then it looks like it was the work of a Crimson reporter (who oddly embraced drugs and, as we mentioned, later joined the ranks of the counterculture) was the reason all that epic, tie-dyed craziness of the 1960s didn't take place right here in Harvard Yard.

A previous version of this post suggested that the storming of University Hall occurred in the early 1960s. In fact, the protest took place in 1969.