The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal

[salvorhardin]

This is from 1995, but what an amazing story!

ONE AFTERNOON IN THE LATE 1970's, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and stumbled upon something shocking and disturbing.

Shocking, because what he found was an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side and rear poses. Disturbing, because on closer inspection the photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual: sticking out from the spine of each and every body was a row of sharp metal pins.

The employee who found them was mystified. The athletic director at the time, Frank Ryan, a former Cleveland Browns quarterback new to Yale, was mystified. But after making some discreet inquiries, he found out what they were -- and took swift action to burn them. He called in a professional, a document-disposal expert, who initiated a two-step torching procedure. First, every single one of the many thousands of photographs was fed into a shredder, and then each of the shreds was fed to the flames, thereby insuring that not a single intact or recognizable image of the nude Yale students -- some of whom had gone on to assume positions of importance in government and society -- would survive.

It was the Bonfire of the Best and the Brightest, and the assumption was that the last embarrassing reminders of a peculiar practice, which masqueraded as science and now looked like a kind of kinky voodoo ritual, had gone up in smoke. The assumption was wrong. Thousands upon thousands of photos from Yale and other elite schools survive to this day.

When I first embarked on my quest for the lost nude "posture photos," I could not decide whether to think of the phenomenon as a scandal or as an extreme example of academic folly -- of what happens when well-intentioned institutions allow their reverence for the reigning conjectures of scientific orthodoxy to persuade them to do things that seem silly or scandalous in retrospect. And now that I've found them, I'm still not sure whether outrage or laughter is the more appropriate reaction. Your response, dear reader, may depend on whether your nude photograph is among them. And if you attended Yale, Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Smith or Princeton -- to name a few of the schools involved -- from the 1940's through the 1960's, there's a chance that yours may be.

Full article (~5,800 words): http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/15/magazine/the-great-ivy-league-nude-posture-photo-scandal.html?pagewanted=all

[snot]

1. My mom had it done.

Or perhaps I shd say, it was done to her.

[salvorhardin]

4. It strikes me that I must know people who had this done too

How weird, and even stranger that it never percolated into popular consciousness like other examples of pseudoscience.

[salvorhardin]

2. My friend Matt Crowley wrote a post about William Sheldon a couple of years ago

There's even a Big Foot connection: http://orgoneresearch.com/2009/11/11/the-atlas-of-men/

[Manifestor_of_Light]

3. at the end he says Marx, Freud and Keynes' theories have been disproven.

Lumping the pseudo-science of studying body type and relating it to personality, with Marx, Freud and Keynes.

Woah what a smug conclusion.

[salvorhardin]

5. I dig Keynes

But if you think what any of those men did was science, then you have a poor understanding of science -- and Keynes would agree with me.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

9. Keynesian economics works. But the govts won't use it.

[NV Whino]

6. What a bizzarre story.

[Tobin S.]

7. Very good read. DURec.

Thanks for posting it.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. I heard about the posture pictures from a Wellesley graduate

in the 1970s. Rumor had it that students from the men's colleges strove to steal the posture pictures from the women's colleges.