Harvard University

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 research into drugs, personality, and behavioral control.¹

Henry Murray and the Stress Experiments

The Harvard psychologist Henry Murray, who had screened agents for the OSS during 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.¹²

Timothy Leary and the Psilocybin Project

In 1960 the lecturer Timothy Leary founded the Harvard Psilocybin Project, administering Psilocybin and later 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 program, which had been seeding psychedelic research across American universities through cut-out foundations for nearly a decade.²³