Andrew Weil's Reporting on Richard Alpert's Harvard Departure and Later Apology

Andrew Weil’s relationship with Richard Alpert was marked by an asymmetry that lasted for years: Weil helped expose the Harvard drug controversy that contributed to Alpert’s departure, then regretted how he had done so and sought to make amends. Alpert initially refused contact, but eventually forgave him, interpreting the rupture as part of the path that led him to become Ram Dass.

The Investigation at Harvard

Weil arrived at Harvard already interested in psychedelics. He had read Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception in high school and, after learning of Timothy Leary and Alpert’s psilocybin project, asked Leary to let him participate. Leary explained that university rules limited the drugs to graduate students. Weil nevertheless obtained mescaline by mail, using university stationery, and helped form an undergraduate mescaline group.

In fall 1962, Weil heard that Alpert had supplied drugs to other undergraduates. Indignant that others had received access he had wanted, he proposed an investigation to his editor at the Crimson. His reporting encountered two obstacles: the students would not make on-the-record accusations, and the newspaper’s lawyers warned against publishing potentially defamatory claims about professors. They advised Weil to give his information to the administration and report on its response, but he still needed a student to confirm the allegation.

Weil traveled to New York City to approach Harry Winston, the father of one of the students, Ronnie Winston. He offered to leave Ronnie’s name out of the article if Ronnie acknowledged receiving drugs from a faculty member. Ronnie then confessed to the dean, adding that the experience had been the most educational one he had had at Harvard. The episode gave the university a student’s admission to consider while protecting his identity in the planned story.

Publicity and Omission

The resulting controversy became national news. Alpert and Leary were described as the only Harvard professors fired in the twentieth century, although Leary technically was not fired: Harvard stopped paying him several months before his contract ended. Weil’s reporting also earned him an assignment for Look magazine, extending the story’s reach.

In his account of the Harvard scene, Weil referred in the third person to an undergraduate group conducting covert mescaline research, without disclosing that he had helped found that group. The omission sharpened the later personal dimension of the affair: he had exposed Alpert’s conduct while leaving out his own participation in the very psychedelic milieu he was describing. The book does not present Weil’s reporting as the sole cause of Alpert’s departure, but it does establish that the story helped introduce millions of Americans to the dispute.

Regret and Reconciliation

Weil later told the author that the episode was not a source of pride and that he had felt badly about it ever since. He sought to make amends to both Alpert and Leary. Leary accepted the apology readily; Alpert, who had left Harvard and later returned from a spiritual journey in India as Ram Dass, would not speak with Weil for years. Weil was pained by that refusal.

After Ram Dass suffered a stroke in 1997, Weil traveled to Hawaii to ask his forgiveness. Ram Dass finally relented and told Weil that he had come to regard his dismissal from Harvard as a blessing: without Weil’s actions, he said, he would never have become Ram Dass. The reconciliation did not erase the original concealment or its consequences. Instead, it changed how the two men could understand the episode: for Weil, it remained a wrong for which he had tried to make amends; for Ram Dass, the painful break had become part of the history of his later identity.