The Harvard psychologist who became a household spiritual name
Before he was Ram Dass, he was Dr. Richard Alpert, a Harvard psychology professor who had grown up in a well-to-do, largely secular Jewish family outside Boston — his father a lawyer who helped found Brandeis University. After his 1963 dismissal (over psychedelics research with Timothy Leary), he traveled to India in 1967, where the guru Neem Karoli Baba gave him the name Ram Dass, and in 1971 he published Be Here Now, one of the best-selling American books to introduce Indian spiritual practice to Western readers. That a man from a secular Jewish Boston family — New England vowels and all — became one of America's most recognized teachers of Hindu devotion is one of the era's more improbable turns.
How we know
Richard Alpert / Ram Dass: b. Apr 6 1931 (Boston area), into a prominent but largely secular Jewish family (he described the home as culturally/politically Jewish, not observant — never bar mitzvahed); father George Alpert (1898–1988), Boston lawyer, last president of the New Haven Railroad, and a founder + first board chairman (1946–54) of Brandeis University. Dismissed from Harvard 1963; to India 1967 (named by Neem Karoli Baba); Be Here Now 1971; d. Dec 22, 2019 (age 88). Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_Dass; Brandeis Univ. archives (George Alpert); UPI 1988 Alpert obituary; ramdass.org/about-ram-dass.
One of many fact-checked wonders across eight traditions at The Spring of Wisdom.