---
aliases:
- Harvard
category: Private Organization
created: 2026-06-13
location: Cambridge, Massachusetts
start: 1636
summary: Harvard University is a Cambridge research university whose psychologist
  Henry Murray ran stress-interrogation experiments on undergraduates and whose lecturer
  Timothy Leary launched the Harvard Psilocybin Project, both entangled with the era's
  CIA interest in drugs and behavioral control.
tags:
- Organization
- Academic
- USA
- MKULTRA
- ColdWar
title: Harvard University
updated: 2026-06-13
---

Harvard University is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded in 1636 and the oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Several of its mid-twentieth-century psychologists and their projects intersected with the [CIA](/organizations/central-intelligence-agency/) research into drugs, personality, and behavioral control.[^1]

### Henry Murray and the Stress Experiments

The Harvard psychologist [Henry Murray](/people/henry-murray/), who had screened agents for the [OSS](/organizations/office-of-strategic-services/) during [World War II](/events/world-war-ii/), conducted experiments between 1959 and 1962 in which undergraduates were subjected to intense, deliberately abusive interrogations designed to measure their responses to stress. One subject was the seventeen-year-old Ted Kaczynski, later the Unabomber. Murray's wartime assessment methods fed directly into the personality-screening interests of postwar American intelligence.[^1][^2]

### Timothy Leary and the Psilocybin Project

In 1960 the lecturer [Timothy Leary](/people/timothy-leary/) founded the Harvard Psilocybin Project, administering [Psilocybin](/concepts/psilocybin/) and later [LSD](/concepts/lsd/) to graduate students, prisoners, and volunteers. Leary and Richard Alpert were dismissed in 1963 amid controversy over the experiments. The project unfolded against the backdrop of the CIA's [MKULTRA](/programs/project-mkultra/) program, which had been seeding psychedelic research across American universities through cut-out foundations for nearly a decade.[^2][^3]

[^1]: Chase, Alston. *Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist*. W.W. Norton, 2003.
[^2]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control*. Times Books, 1979.
[^3]: Lee, Martin A., and Bruce Shlain. *Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond*. Grove Press, 1985.