Naked Orientation: When Yale Freshmen Were Photographed Nude

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One afternoon in the late 1970s, a Yale employee noticed a locked door in the gym. He was curious, so he opened it. The room looked like it hadn't been touched for decades. Inside, he found boxes, stacks of them, and inside those boxes, photographs. Thousands of photographs of naked young men shot from the front side and profiles.

The employee didn't know what to make of it, so we brought the athletic director down to see. The director didn't know either. But after some digging, they realized they'd uncovered the remnants of a strange chapter of Yale's history, and they acted quickly.

“Every photograph was shredded, then for extra precaution, the shreds were burned.”

All to ensure that no recognizable images of these Yale students would survive. They wanted to make it all disappear, but that history wouldn't stay hidden for long. I'm Margot Gray. This week on campus files, the forgotten history of poster photos on America's college campuses.

I grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, and you will never find a place more homogeneous, or more boringly normal than Fargo.

This is Richard Sennishal. By his senior year of high school in 1965, he was more than ready to leave his hometown of Fargo, North Dakota behind. He had the credentials. He was a national merit scholar, top of his class, but that didn't make the college application process any less daunting. When it came time to think about going to college, I didn't really have any help.

“My parents were supportive, but they had really no knowledge or any ability to assist me.”

So I was doing this entire process by myself. But Richard did just fine on his own. He applied to seven Ivy League schools in Stanford, and got into all of them. He ended up picking Yale. He wanted to be an architect, and a brand-new Yale building had just graced the cover of Time magazine. So in September 1965, he and his dad packed up the car and drove east to New Haven, Connecticut. Two days and 1500 miles later, Richard and his dad arrived at Yale.

It was one of those perfect early fall days. The leaves just starting to change color.

I've never seen the campus, and other than a few pictures in Yale promotional materials,

didn't really know what it looked like. And there wasn't anything grand in Fargo at all. The tallest building in Fargo was six stars. So everything, but I hit the campus, I went, "My God, this is gorgeous." And I was just stunned. It wasn't only the beauty of the campus that surprised him.

From the start, Richard says he felt like a stranger in a strange land. I knew nothing about the East Coast, nothing about New England. I mean, North Dakota is as far from Yale as you can possibly get. For starters, Richard was confused why so many of his classmates somehow knew each other already. He discovered that many of them, the Preppies, as he calls them, had come from the same small circle of elite prep schools.

And then there was the uniform. Yale had instructed freshmen to wear a coat and tie to class, so Richard had due to flee purchased a whole new wardrobe. But when he showed up, he learned there was an unspoken memo. Everyone actually wore tweet jackets with elbow patches, and a deliberately rumpled tie. There wasn't a thing that happened at any given day that wasn't outside of my experience.

But one thing in particular felt completely outside his experience. It began when he got instructions to report to Yale's main gymnasium, pain Whitney. It's a massive high-rise building, but multiple indoor pools are indoor running tracks of weight rooms and bunches of locker rooms. And you know, we call it pain Whitney, the captain of the sport. Because if you see the building, it's a high-rise Gothic building that could easily pass for a French cathedral.

And he was nervous. He wasn't exactly the athletic type.

“And as it turns out, I passed the sit-up and push-up part of the fitness test.”

But I failed to pull up part, and so was assigned to six weeks of remedial exercise until I could do the requisite number of full ups. This portion of the evaluation didn't surprise Richard. He'd had his share of sit-up and pull-up tests in high school, but the next part did. They were going to evaluate his posture. I recall being shuffled into a locker room and told to strip nude.

Now that in itself was not immediately troublesome because it my high school, the boys swam nude and jam. Yes, you were that right. Until the 1970s, nude swimming was standard for high school boys across much of the country. In fact, the American Public Health Association formally recommended nude swimming as part of good pool management. So I thought, well, okay, but then I walked into this windowless room and there were three no-mish little men there.

Two of the men stood off to the side, observing.

The third motioned for him to step onto a platform.

While I stood there, took a grease pencil and felt all over my body looking for the bone points to point at which various joints and bones were closest to the surface. Shoulders, shoulder blades, vertebra, hip bones, joints, knees, elbows, whatever, and marked each of those spots with a black grease pencil. I can still feel that little old man's fingertips, prodding my body looking for spots to put the black marker that was a very strange experience. There were a few mirrors positioned around him. So one photograph captured three angles, front, back, and profile.

Richard said, "Sail is the camera flashed." By this point, it was pretty disturbing. But again, everything was new and different for me. I just assumed, well, this is the way they do it on the East Coast. And it was just me that was not in tune with the reality of this grand Ivy League institution.

But when Richard got back to his dorm, he started talking about the photos with some of the guys on his hall. And it turned out he wasn't the only person who'd found it weird. As it happened, the guys in the sweet next to mine had also been to public high schools. And we were sort of comparing notes going, "Boy, it was that weird."

And that's about the first time that it really sunk in how strange and invasive that posture evaluation had been.

“Now, I think it may not have been as big a surprise for the Preppies who had older brothers who had gone to Yale.”

Those fathers had gone to Yale who knew the culture and probably like, "Yeah, I'll hold home," right? Richard's hunch is right. I talked to several alumni whose fathers or older brothers had also gone to Yale. The Preppies, as Richard likes to call them. And they'd all heard about the posture photos before they arrived on campus.

Some had actually been coached on how to pose, so they'd be more likely to pass the posture or evaluation. But even for the Preppies knowing what was coming didn't make it any less unsettling. And yet everyone went along with it. No one I spoke to could recall a single student objecting to the photos.

Times were very different. You know, we were straight arrow kids. We grew up in church and home at school. We were taught to follow rules and to do what your elders told you. And nobody had started to rebel yet.

The 60s that you think of as the 60s didn't start until probably about 67. When suddenly the Vietnam War really triggered a whole social change and activism, man, whatever. Nobody would have said, "No, not going to do that." Just was not. We didn't start saying no until about 67.

When I was a question of life or death. And it wasn't just Yale students who went along with this. From the 1940s through the 1960s, posture evaluations were standard practice at colleges and universities across the country. We're talking tens of thousands of photographs of nude freshmen stored in university archives.

Personally, I'd never heard of any of this before researching this episode.

And the more I learned, the more questions I had.

“The first being. Why did schools care about their students' posture in the first place?”

But what I wanted to do was not to go to the end of my study. The semester of the day has already been accepted. The Internet is so amazing. You can say that you're right. Yes, you're right, you're right.

That's right. You're right. You're right. You're right. You're right.

You're right. You're right. You're right. You're right.

“Plus life is not available to me, but there is a way.”

We are all in the process of becoming ourselves.

Listen to becoming you wherever you get your podcasts. We're supposed to learn from our own mistakes. But other people's errors can be instructive too. From efforts to control the weather that went disastrously awry to the untimely death of the Segway boss.

History is a treasure trove, mishaps, and meltdowns. You can teach us all, I'm Tim Halfed, host of cautionary tales, the podcast that minds the greatest fiascoes of the past for their most valuable lessons. Listen to cautionary tales wherever you get your podcasts. From today's perspective, Richard's freshman orientation at Yale was, well, strange.

Even the fitness test part of it.

Imagine showing up to college and getting tested on pull-ups, push-ups, and set-ups.

Why did Yale care? Here's how Richard explains it.

“Yale in the '60s was dedicated to raising the next thousand male leaders.”

It was all male institution. It was directed at creating the next round of politicians and bank presidents and famous lawyers and doctors. So this was just part of an overall training to make you into that mold. I still don't know why my future doctor or lawyer needs to do pull-ups, but I get the idea. Yale wanted the next generation of American leaders to be physically fed.

What I can't understand is why posture mattered so much. So much so that students were tested on it and had to take classes if they failed. So I reached out to a historian for answers. Dr. Beth Linker.

I'm a professor in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

And I'm the author, most recently, of the book "Slouch Posture Panic in Modern America." Dr. Linker wasn't planning on writing a book about posture. She stumbled on the topic while doing research for another book at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. I was looking at World War I, I was looking at the birth of rehabilitation as a form of aftercare for disabled soldiers. So I opened this box and it was just a bunch of tracing paper with footprints on it.

And I was like, what is this? It turned out that those footprints belonged to World War I drafties. The military had taken them as part of the medical screening process. At the time, flat feet were considered a disability. Men with low arches were routinely rejected from military service.

“And flat feet weren't the only thing that could disqualify you from joining the army.”

A posture defect could, too. It could be asymmetrical shoulders. It could be leg length difference. It could be swayed back. It could be hunched over something called pigeon chest,

which was kind of a concave chest. So all of those things could have fallen under a postural defect. So you could be rejected from the draft simply for having bad posture. And not because the army cared about how commanding you looked in the uniform. But because of a widely accepted idea at the time,

that posture was tied to overall health. For a posture, maybe a sign of something wrong with you. You may be run down physically or over tired or upset. You need a thorough checkup by your family doctor to discover the cause of your posture defects.

The belief was that slouching didn't just look bad. It made you physically weaker and more susceptible to illness. If you're usually slump, the health of the whole body is affected. Our skeletons and muscles are designed to support our vital organs so that they can do their best work.

If we sag, these organs are pushed out of their proper positions. In medical theory at this time in the early 20th century, they start to make links between poor posture and one of the greatest killers of the day tuberculosis. And what they argue is that if somebody has a slouching or slumping posture,

they're breathing and respiratory capacity is compromised

It became a national public health campaign.

“Posters went up in schools, doctors offices, factories,”

one poster read, poor posture encourages tuberculosis, erect carriage, combats it. What is good posture? How can you make it a habit? Like a lot of boys and girls, your posture is your problem.

What are you going to do about it? That wasn't French thinking. It was being promoted by academics at some of the most elite campuses in the country. There was even an organization called the American Poster League that was made up largely of Ivy League professors.

At Yale, one prominent professor blamed his own tuberculosis on his hunched back

and at Harvard in 1917, a physician led the first large-scale

systematic study of posture. It was called the Harvard Slouch study. The Harvard Slouch study was the only posture that counted as good posture was this like perfect plum line vertical posture. So he found that 80% of Harvard students had poor posture.

The Harvard Slouch study helped spark a full-blown posture obsession on college campuses. And that obsession outlusted the threat of tuberculosis. Even after antibiotics became widely available in the mid-1940s, the focus on posture didn't fade.

The thinking around it just changed. The infectious disease part kind of went away and instead morphs into this concern about bad posture is bad for more chronic conditions so cardiac conditions diabetes obesity.

In other words, good posture became something of a shorthand for being physically fit and in the mid-20th century, physical fitness mattered a lot. The country had just arrived two world wars and was now heading into the Cold War. National strength and military readiness were being talked about

in terms of physical preparedness. Are you ready physically for this training? Your body's got to be able to take it. Because service means new physical demands on strength and endurance.

“That's why in military training can't afford to kind of become flabby”

and we need to keep our bodies hardened for any future wars, especially for men, but for women about kind of burden the next generation of fit Americans.

Universities had a crucial role to play.

They were raising the future leaders of the free world. Leaders who needed to be physically prepared. So in the 50s and 60s, physical fitness tests became routine on college campuses. Built into orientation programs, PE classes, medical screenings for incoming students, and posture exams became a key part of those tests at schools across the country.

The exact nature of the posture exams differed from campus to campus and year to year. At some places, an examiner simply looked you up and down and took notes. Other campuses used tools like the schematic graph, a device that allowed examiners to manually trace the student's silhouette. Eventually, camera photography would win out partly because it was cheaper as a 20th century progressed.

And also, it was seen as more scientific, because tracing is done by the human hand. And so that looks a little bit more backward, a little bit less modern, not as hardcore scientific. In most cases, students pose nude for these posture photographs. Maybe if they were lucky in a bathing suit or halter top.

The camera captured every angle, front, back, profile, examiners then scrutinized the images. And at most schools, if your posture didn't meet the ideal standard, you were sent to corrective classes. Yes, student would work on crawling and walking and standing and perfecting their posture. And for some students, this was two years of physical education.

“Remember, Richard, he ended up failing his posture exam.”

So he had to take these classes during his freshman year at Yale. He can't recall exactly how long the program lasted, but he certainly stretched on for at least several weeks. Once he finished though, he says he more or less forgot about the whole thing. It just sort of disappeared from memory.

There was so much more going on. You can imagine the change in your life at 17, where you go far away from home and enter a completely foreign environment. And everything takes an adjustment. That one occurrence kind of drifted into the past pretty quickly.

Richard didn't think about those posture photos for decades. Then something made him remember and begin to rethink everything.

These posture exams are happening in historically black colleges.

“They happened in a lot of state universities.”

This was not just an Ivy League phenomenon. Thousands of students were photographed naked each year. At Yale, that included George Bush and Bob Woodward, at Wellesley, Hillary Clinton and Diane Sawyer, at Vassar, Merrill Street. At most schools, a majority of freshmen failed the test.

They were told that they had posture problems and needed to take remedial classes. So, for countless American college students, these posture classes became something of a rate of passage. But the whole practice was living on borrowed time. By the end of the 1960s,

posture photographs were on their way out.

In fact, by the time Richard graduated from Yale in 1969, freshman were no longer subjected to these photographs. So, what happened? Dr. Linker says that there wasn't a single moment that ended it. Instead, a handful of forces quietly converged.

One of them was the feminist movement. A new movement for women's liberation is launched, and once again protestors take to the street to support their demands for total freedom, economically, politically, socially.

“Remember, the feminist movement is already having protests”

at the Mesmericic Contest. Inside, one set of young women accepted the showvinist bubbles. Outside, others carried on with more consciousness raising. We have broad burning, we have all of that going on. And there's just no way that, especially out these old women's colleges,

that anybody is going to stand for a posture exam. At Cornell University, a group of female students staged a quiet rebellion. They sold a stack of the posture photos, and then pinned the blame on the men. The administration looked pretty incompetent, unable to protect its students. And not long after, the entire posture program was shut down there.

The other thing that stops the posture photos is that this is the beginning of the disability rights movement,

and people with severe disabilities, successfully gaining access for the first time to higher education.

“The handicap demand, the Section 504, the Civil Rights Act, to be signed.”

It guarantees the rights of the handicap to an education and employment. So you have a lot of post-polio people with polio who are wheelchair users who fight against, physical education mandates. Another major factor was the passage of FERPA in 1974. The Family Educational Rights and Protection Act.

Students got sweeping new privacy protections, and suddenly universities had to rethink what kinds of records they kept and who had access to them. All of these things come together to make it so that something like a practice of taking nude, photographs of the university students, and keeping a record of these nude photographs, seemed a nathema to the spirit of the times.

So schools quietly stopped the practice, no more nude photography. But they were still left with decades worth of the negative sitting in storage, and so began another quiet operation, disposal. Many schools began destroying the images. And one reason for that was that a lot of colleges are not going to have the money to put these photographs in archival holdings.

So they're not going to do that. The other thing is that they had a suspicion, especially with FERPA, that it wasn't going to look too good if these photographs got in the wrong hands. But it wasn't as simple as just getting rid of the photos. At some schools, Lake Smith College, there were years long debates.

Archivists wanted to keep them arguing they could protect alumni's privacy by restricting access to the photos for a few decades. But university PR and legal counsel were adamant to destroy the photos. And generally, they won. At all of these schools, the alumni, the people actually in the photos weren't part of the conversations. Most of the alumni assumed the photos were long gone if they thought about them at all,

which is why a New York Times article set off such outrage. In 1995, reporter Ron Rosenbaum published a piece called The Great Ivy League nude poster photo scandal. Rosenbaum knew the subject firsthand. He'd had his own poster photo taken as a freshman at Yale in the 1960s. What he revealed in the article was damning.

Some of them had made their way to a highly controversial psychologist. William E. Scheldin.

“Scheldin had interest in looking at external physical attributes,”

thinking that those certain physical attributes could tell you something about a person's inner thoughts, characteristics and psychology. Scheldin developed a theory called somatotyping.

It was basically a numbering system that sorted people into three body types.

And a morphs, actomorphs, and mesomorphs. Scheldin believed these body types told you just about everything about a person. Their intelligence, their character, their criminality. Someone who was linear or angular, for example, was considered more likely to be homosexual. Someone who was rounder was considered more likely to be lazy and undisciplined.

To prove his theory, Scheldin needed photos, lots of them.

“Dr. Scheldin, can you explain why we have to have a somatotype photograph?”

So we based the whole early work on somatotyping on the process of photographing many thousands of different growing boys and girls and college students. Scheldin was taking plenty of photos on his own, but he was also pursuing another source. The poster photographs that universities had been taking for years. It didn't strike me that it was that difficult for him to get access to these photos. He just simply wrote letters to other professors on university campuses,

and they would just send him the negatives or the prints. We don't know exactly how many images Scheldin got his hands on, but we do know this. His 1954 book, The Atlas of Men, includes no shortage of photos of Harvard freshman.

Then there was Rosenbaum's second bomb shell.

He discovered that contrary to what alumni believed, many of these photos still existed. Yes, most universities had quietly destroyed their archives years ago. But thousands of images were still sitting in William Scheldin's personal collection.

“How's in the National Anthropological Archives at this Smithsonian?”

Rosenbaum eventually got access to the boxes. And inside, he found perfectly preserved negatives of nude freshmen. Some still labeled with ages, height, weight, names. Entire graduating classes were in there. Yield class of 1950, 63, 64, 66, 71, Princeton class of 1952, Penn class of 1951, the list went on. When alumni found out about this, they were furious, and they didn't say quiet.

Archivists were just inundated with, "I rate alumni that these photos still existed." And so, they were ordered by General Counsel at their universities and administrators to travel to the Smithsonian to incinerate any evidence of photographs from their particular institution. Until this whole saga resurfaced, Richard had been given these photos any thought. Let alone wondered where his might have ended up. That would be kind of embarrassing to have out there, but maybe less so for me than saw my other compatriots.

I mean, George W. Bush was a class ahead of me at Yale, and I'm sure what through the same thing. This is Dan probably did in the '40s, and talking about embarrassing, thinking about ostriches floating around for public figures. So I hope they were destroyed. So I can say, "Although nowadays I might be glad to see how young and fit I will send that age." When I started working on this story, I figured it would be hard to find sources. Anyone who'd had their poster photo taken would likely be in their '80s or '90s by now.

Meaning, they probably weren't online. So I submitted a letter to Yale's alumni magazine explaining what I was working on, and asking anyone with memories of the poster photos to reach out. I expected one, maybe two responses, three at most. But over the next few weeks, dozens of messages came in from Yale graduates, many saying the same thing,

that they hadn't thought about those poster photos in decades. But yes, of course they remembered. One email stood out. It was from Ivan Burger. He was Yale class of 1961. I grew up in the Logatoc Connecticut about 20 miles from Yale.

I went to, I think, as somewhat subpart, grammar school, and it was obvious, early in first grade,

Ivan had the scores to get into Yale, but he worried about the price tag of tuition. In the end, he got a scholarship.

“It came with a condition, though. He'd have to work for the school.”

Like my freshman year, I was a bus boy in Commons. Now, Commons was the freshman dining room. Being a bus boy in Commons is a bit like feeding the wolves. By sophomore year, Ivan was hoping to find a different job, and as luck would have it, there was a new job opening that involved one of his hobbies, photography.

In high school, I shot at Ella with a lot of pictures. And I also add my own darker room, and a very, very small business taking pictures for people. So Ivan signed up for the photography job, but it was not at all what he was expecting. He wouldn't be taking gearbox photos or snapping action shots of college athletes. He'd be taking nude poster photos of the incoming freshman.

“"We had to work around my class schedule, so I would probably do an hour or two a day.”

They would just position the subject, click the button, or stroke white school up at once. Next, it could be a hundred in the day." Ivan's job didn't end once the photos were taken. He was also responsible for developing the prints. Hundreds of nude poster photos.

"This is very, very boring if you are a straight guy. I suspect it would become boring after 10 minutes if you were the horniest street girl in East Coast. You know, it's one impudio can guy and for another God that I know what making them look like." Ivan says he didn't just make a single set of prints.

He made a second set too for W.H. Sheldon.

"We were also sending a copy of each of the pictures to him. And he would occasionally come in to check on things or tell whatever he was coming in for. And I have no idea whatever became of that project." "And did it ever seem strange to you that this doctor was getting access to the photos?" No, no.

We weren't as privacy oriented back then because it weren't as many distributions they were.

“I mean in those days, if someone had gotten a hold on my posture picture, what the hell would they have done?”

Whereas now they could post it on Facebook. Ivan didn't think about the photos for decades. They didn't even come up when he and a friend were recently talking about the strangest jobs they'd ever had. Only then I listed the odd ones erecting door frames, selling advertising and flowering technical publications.

And never thought of thinking of shooting pictures of naked men.

If you've got a story idea, we would love to hear about it. Send us an email at [email protected]. And if you're loving this podcast, be sure to click follow on your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. While you're there, leave us a review and a 5 star rating. Campus Files is an Odyssey original podcast hosted by Margot Gray and Ian Mont.

Our executive producers are Leah Ries Stennis and Lloyd Lockrich. Campus Files is produced by Ian Mont and Margot Gray, sound design and engineering by Andy Jastquitz and Zach Clark. Legal support by Laura Burman and Melissa Jean. Original music by Davy Sumner. Special thanks to more current Josephina Francis, Hillary Schaff, Eric Donley, Keith Hutchison Rose,

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