Early Life and Education
Richard Alpert was born on April 6, 1931, in Newton, Massachusetts, into a prominent, wealthy Jewish family. His father, George Alpert, was a successful lawyer, one of the founders of Brandeis University, and served as president of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad Company. His mother, Gertrude (nee Levin), was a homemaker. Alpert later described his upbringing as materially privileged but emotionally complex, marked by a sense of spiritual emptiness he could not articulate as a child.
Alpert was educated at the Williston Academy, a preparatory school in Easthampton, Massachusetts. He earned his bachelor's degree in psychology from Tufts University in 1952, a master's degree from Wesleyan University, and in 1957 completed his PhD in human development at Stanford University. He also held a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale.
By 1958, Alpert had joined the psychology department at Harvard University, where he held appointments in the Department of Social Relations and the Graduate School of Education. He was, by all outward measures, a model of academic success: a young professor at the most prestigious university in America, with a sports car, a sailboat, a Cessna airplane, and visiting appointments at Berkeley and Stanford. Yet he remained, as he later wrote, "a Jewish boy who desperately wanted to be free."
