Meeting your roommate, choosing classes, and… nude photos? These Ivies got in hot
water for taking naked photos of students, but the reason they did so is surprising.
Freshman orientation always includes a few boring events. Meetings about all the dormitory rules
you're going to break, overviews of the university code of conduct, advising sessions... yadda,
yadda, yadda. Can we start the party yet? But students these days can be glad that there's
one orientation week event that used to be common practice at Ivy League schools that fortunately
fell out of fashion decades ago. According to The New York Times, universities like Yale,
Harvard, Princeton, and other elite institutions used to require freshmen to take nude photos as
part of a study on "posture." While Harvard took such photos from the 1880s all the way
to the middle of the 20th century, most of the universities involved snapped their troves of
pervy pics from the 1940s to the 1960s. The subjects of the photos had metal pins placed
down their spines to study their posture, or at least to make it appear as though that was
the reason they'd been forced to strip down in front of creepy, lab-coated strangers.
These schools prepare many of the country's political and cultural elite,
and several famous and influential people had their photos taken,
including former President George Bush Sr., former New York Governor George Pataki,
Watergate reporter Bob Woodward, journalist Diane Sawyer, actress Meryl Streep,
and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. But as weird as a mandatory
"posture photo" study sounds, the true reasons behind the project are actually much creepier.
Yale art history professor George Hersey said that the photos were actually part of
an anthropological study that had nothing to do with posture. The idea that it was,
he said, was a lie told to participants. The man behind the operation was named W. H. Sheldon,
a psychologist from Columbia University who was trying to find
correlations between people's body types and their personalities and temperaments.
"A photograph is necessary—"
Sheldon developed the theory of "somatotypes," different body types that could explain a person's
mannerisms, behaviors, habits, and other pop-psych mumbo jumbo.
"Somatotype simple means 'body type.'"
The words he created to explain these types — ectomorphic, mesomorphic,
and endomorphic — are still used to this day, but only to describe general body shapes.
His theories linking these physical types to psychological ones have been largely debunked.
While it may be tempting to believe that certain people behave certain ways,
Yale graduate Ron Rosenbaum related what Sheldon was doing to the Nazis,
who also analyzed photos in this way. The photos apparently had no pornographic value
and were used strictly for science. The project ended up sounding too much like now-disproved
pseudoscience eugenics, and by the end of his life, Sheldon's theories and studies were no
longer accepted by the upper echelons of U.S. academia that had previously espoused them.
In 1950, Sheldon took his operation to the University of Washington, in Seattle,
where he wanted to shoot a bunch of photos of nude female freshmen to form
the basis of his "Atlas of Women," a companion project to his "Atlas of Men."
"If you really want to visualize the shape and form of something,
a picture is a little better than words."
But a scandal ensued when one of the photographed students told her parents. Lawyers got involved
and the pictures were burned. Then Harvard, Yale, Vassar, and others followed suit,
burning thousands of the purported "posture photos" in the 1960s and '70s. However,
thousands were not burned, and one of Sheldon's disciples tried to get them back into a top-tier
university for them to be studied, but was shown the door every place he went.
They finally ended up in the National Anthropological Archives in the Smithsonian
Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. They were accompanied by documents revealing that they
had been used to relate smoking to masculinity, and other documents revealed that while not
exactly on the level of Nazis, Sheldon sure was a racist. A 1924 study of his claimed that African
American and Mexican children stopped acquiring intelligence at 10 and 12 years old, respectively.
A week after publishing the findings of those photos and documents, The New York Times reported
that the Smithsonian had sealed the stash of nudes for good. A historian who had his photo taken at
Yale in the '60s said he couldn't understand why the museum kept the nudes in the first place.