Andrew Weil's Reporting on the Harvard Scandal and Apology to Timothy Leary

Andrew Weil’s relationship with Timothy Leary was shaped by a reversal: Weil first sought access to Leary’s psychedelic research, then helped investigate the conduct surrounding it, and later apologized for the reporting that contributed to Leary’s departure from Harvard University. The episode made Weil both a participant in the undergraduate psychedelic scene and one of the journalists who brought its conflict with university rules to national attention. Years afterward, Leary accepted Weil’s apology, while the episode remained part of a more complicated reckoning with Richard Alpert, whose own dismissal was also bound up in the story.

Student Interest and Uneasy Access

Weil arrived at Harvard University already curious about psychedelics. He had read Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception in high school, and once he learned about Leary’s Psilocybin Project, he went to Leary’s office to ask whether he could take part. Leary explained that university rules limited the drugs to graduate students. He nevertheless tried to help Weil find mescaline, telling him about a Texas company that would mail it while it was still legal. Weil placed an order using university stationery and became increasingly interested in the drugs’ possibilities.

That interest did not make Weil an insider in Leary and Richard Alpert’s research circle. He helped form an undergraduate mescaline group, but wanted to join the more exclusive project associated with the two professors. In the fall of 1962, hearing that Alpert had given drugs to other undergraduates, Weil became indignant and proposed an investigation to the Harvard Crimson. His own position was therefore divided: he was interested in the work and had helped organize undergraduate drug use, yet he also objected to the reported extension of that activity by a faculty member in breach of university rules.

Building the Crimson Investigation

Weil developed leads involving a handful of students who were said to have received drugs from Alpert. Turning those leads into a publishable account proved difficult. None of the students was initially willing to make an on-the-record statement, and the newspaper’s lawyers warned against printing potentially defamatory accusations about professors. Their advice was to give the information to the university administration and report on any action the administration took. To proceed, Weil still needed a student willing to come forward.

He traveled to New York City to speak with the father of one student, the prominent jeweler Harry Winston. Weil offered to leave the student’s name out of the story if the student admitted receiving drugs from a faculty member. Ronnie Winston then went to the dean and confirmed that he had taken drugs from Alpert. His account also included an unexpected judgment: he described the experience as the most educational one he had had at Harvard. The admission gave the Crimson a student willing to go on the record and allowed the university to respond to the allegations.

Public Exposure and Harvard’s Decision

The resulting story became national news and brought the Harvard controversy to millions of Americans. Weil’s reporting also led to an assignment from Look magazine, which carried the dispute to a wider audience. In describing the psychedelic activity at Harvard, Weil reported on an undergraduate group conducting covert mescaline research but did not disclose that he had helped found it. That omission gave the report a striking asymmetry: Weil presented himself as an investigator of the scene while leaving out his own connection to one part of it.

The article appeared as Leary was already preparing to leave Harvard. By spring 1963, he was skipping classes and saying that he intended to depart when his contract ended at the close of the school year. Alpert, by contrast, had received a new appointment in the School of Education and planned to stay. The new Crimson article changed that course: Harvard dismissed both men. Their formal situations were not identical. Leary was not technically fired, but Harvard stopped paying him several months before his contract expired; Alpert lost his appointment. The exposure gave the university a public occasion to act and turned their departures into a national controversy.

Apology and Reconciliation

Weil later regarded the episode as one of his least honorable moments. When discussing it years afterward, he acknowledged that he had felt badly about the story and had tried to make amends to both Leary and Richard Alpert, who became known as Ram Dass after leaving Harvard and traveling to India. Leary accepted Weil’s apology readily. The account presents him as someone who did not hold a grudge, a response that allowed the personal relationship to outlast the public conflict.

Alpert’s response took longer. He refused to speak with Weil for years, and the estrangement troubled Weil. After Alpert suffered a stroke in 1997, Weil traveled to Hawaii to seek his forgiveness. Alpert eventually relented and told Weil that he had come to regard his dismissal from Harvard as a blessing: without Weil’s actions, he said, he might never have become Ram Dass. The reconciliation did not erase Weil’s role in the reporting or the consequences for either professor. Instead, it gave the episode a second meaning: an investigation that helped end their Harvard careers also became, in Alpert’s later understanding, part of the path that led to his spiritual life beyond the university.