---
created_at: '2013-11-12T20:13:43.000Z'
title: The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal (1995)
url: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/15/magazine/the-great-ivy-league-nude-posture-photo-scandal.html?pagewanted=all
author: kitcar
points: 137
story_text: ''
comment_text: 
num_comments: 71
story_id: 
story_title: 
story_url: 
parent_id: 
created_at_i: 1384287223
_tags:
- story
- author_kitcar
- story_6720621
objectID: '6720621'
year: 1995

---
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.

Your response may also depend on how you feel about the fact that some
of these schools made nude or seminude photographs of you available to
the disciples of what many now regard as a pseudo-science without asking
permission. And on how you feel about an obscure archive in Washington
making them available for researchers to study.

While investigating the strange odyssey of the missing nude "posture
photos," I found that the issue is, in every respect, a very touchy
matter -- indeed, a kind of touchstone for registering the uneven
evolution of attitudes toward body, race and gender in the past
half-century. UP YOUR LEGS FOR YALE

I personally have posed nude only twice in my life. The second time --
for a John and Yoko film titled "Up Your Legs Forever," which has been
screened at the Whitney -- I was one of many, it was Art, and let's
leave it at that. But the first time was even more strange and bizarre
because of its strait-laced Ivy setting, its preliberation context --
and yes, because of the metal pins stuck on my body.

One fall afternoon in the mid-60's, shortly after I arrived in New Haven
to begin my freshman year at Yale, I was summoned to that sooty Gothic
shrine to muscular virtue known as Payne Whitney Gym. I reported to a
windowless room on an upper floor, where men dressed in crisp white
garments instructed me to remove all of my clothes. And then -- and this
is the part I still have trouble believing -- they attached metal pins
to my spine. There was no actual piercing of skin, only of dignity, as
four-inch metal pins were affixed with adhesive to my vertebrae at
regular intervals from my neck down. I was positioned against a wall; a
floodlight illuminated my pin-spiked profile and a camera captured it.

It didn't occur to me to object: I'd been told that this "posture photo"
was a routine feature of freshman orientation week. Those whose pins
described a too violent or erratic postural curve were required to
attend remedial posture classes.

The procedure did seem strange. But I soon learned that it was a
long-established custom at most Ivy League and Seven Sisters schools.
George Bush, George Pataki, Brandon Tartikoff and Bob Woodward were
required to do it at Yale. At Vassar, Meryl Streep; at Mount Holyoke,
Wendy Wasserstein; at Wellesley, Hillary Rodham and Diane Sawyer. All of
them -- whole generations of the cultural elite -- were asked to pose.
But however much the colleges tried to make this bizarre procedure seem
routine, its undeniable strangeness engendered a scurrilous strain of
folklore. THE MISMEASURE OF MAN

There were several salacious stories circulating at Yale back in the
60's. Most common was the report that someone had broken into a photo
lab in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and stolen the negatives of that year's
Vassar posture nudes, which were supposedly for sale on the Ivy League
black market or available to the initiates of Skull and Bones. Little
did I know how universal this myth was.

"Ah, yes, the famous rumored stolen Vassar posture pictures," Nora
Ephron (Wellesley '62) recalled when I spoke with her. "But don't forget
the famous rumored stolen Wellesley posture photos."

"Wellesley too?"

"Oh, yes," she said. "It's one of those urban legends."

She can laugh about it now, she said, but in retrospect the whole idea
that she and all her smart classmates went along with being photographed
in this way dismays her. "We were idiots," she said. "Idiots\!"

Sally Quinn (Smith '63), the Washington writer, expressed alarm when I
first reached her. "God, I'm relieved," she said. "I thought you were
going to tell me you found mine. You always thought when you did it that
one day they'd come back to haunt you. That 25 years later, when your
husband was running for President, they'd show up in Penthouse."

Another Wellesley alumna, Judith Martin, author of the Miss Manners
column, told me she's "appalled in retrospect" that the college forced
this practice on their freshmen. "Why weren't we more appalled at the
time?" she wondered. Nonetheless, she confessed to making a kind of
good-natured extortionate use of the posture-photo specter herself.

"I do remember making a reunion speech in which I offered to sell them
back to people for large donations. And there were a lot of people who
turned pale before they realized it was a joke."

Distinguishing between joke and reality is often difficult in
posture-photo lore. Consider the astonishing rumor Ephron clued me in
to, a story she assured me she'd heard from someone very close to the
source:

"There was a guy, an adjunct professor of sociology who was working on a
grant for the tobacco industry. And what I heard when I was at Wellesley
was that, using Harvard posture photos, he had proved conclusively that
the more manly you are, the more you smoked. And I believe the criterion
for manliness was the obvious one."

"The obvious one?"

"I assume -- what else could it have been?"

In fact, the study was real. I was able to track it down, although the
conclusion it reached about Harvard men was somewhat different from what
Ephron recalled. But, clearly, the nude-posture-photo practice
engendered heated fantasies in both sexes. Perhaps in the otherwise
circumspect Ivy League-Seven Sisters world, nude posture photos were the
licensed exception to propriety that spawned licentious fantasies.
Fantasies that were to lie unremembered, or at least unpublicized until.
. . . THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED

It was Naomi Wolf, author of "The Beauty Myth," who opened the Pandora's
box of posture-photo controversy. In that book and in a 1992 Op-Ed piece
in The Times, Wolf (Yale '84) bitterly attacked Dick Cavett (Yale '55)
for a joke he'd made at Wolf's graduation ceremonies. According to Wolf,
who'd never had a posture photo taken (the practice was discontinued at
Yale in 1968), Cavett took the microphone and told the following
anecdote:

"When I was an undergraduate . . . there were no women \[ at Yale \] .
The women went to Vassar. At Vassar they had nude photographs taken of
women in gym class to check their posture. One year the photos were
stolen and turned up for sale in New Haven's red-light district." His
punchline: "The photos found no buyers."

Wolf was horrified. Cavett, she wrote in her book, "transposed us for a
moment out of the gentle quadrangle where we had been led to believe we
were cherished, and into the tawdry district four blocks away, where
stolen photographs of our naked bodies would find no buyers."

Cavett responded, in a letter to The Times, by dismissing the joke as an
innocuous "example of how my Yale years showed up in my long-forgotten
nightclub act."

Wolf's horrified account attests to the totemic power of the
posture-photo legend. But little did she know, little did Cavett know,
how potentially sinister the entire phenomenon really was. No one knew
until. . . . THE NAZI-POSTURE-PHOTO ALLEGATION

This is where things get really strange. Shortly after Cavett's reply,
George Hersey, a respected art history professor at Yale, wrote a letter
to The Times that ran under the headline "A Secret Lies Hidden in Vassar
and Yale Nude 'Posture Photos.' " Sounding an ominous note, Hersey
declared that the photos "had nothing to do with posture . . . that is
only what we were told."

Hersey went on to say that the pictures were actually made for
anthropological research: "The reigning school of the time, presided
over by E. A. Hooton of Harvard and W. H. Sheldon" -- who directed an
institute for physique studies at Columbia University -- "held that a
person's body, measured and analyzed, could tell much about
intelligence, temperament, moral worth and probable future achievement.
The inspiration came from the founder of social Darwinism, Francis
Galton, who proposed such a photo archive for the British population."

And then Hersey evoked the specter of the Third Reich:

"The Nazis compiled similar archives analyzing the photos for racial as
well as characterological content (as did Hooton). . . . The Nazis often
used American high school yearbook photographs for this purpose. . . .
The American investigators planned an archive that could correlate each
freshman's bodily configuration ('somatotype') and physiognomy with
later life history. That the photos had no value as pornography is a
tribute to their resolutely scientific nature."

A truly breathtaking missive. What Hersey seemed to be saying was that
entire generations of America's ruling class had been unwitting guinea
pigs in a vast eugenic experiment run by scientists with a master-race
hidden agenda. My classmate Steve Weisman, the Times editor who first
called my attention to the letter, pointed out a fascinating corollary:
The letter managed in a stroke to confer on some of the most
overprivileged people in the world the one status distinction it seemed
they'd forever be denied -- victim.

My first stop in what would turn out to be a prolonged and eventful
quest for the truth about the posture photos was Professor Hersey's
office in New Haven. A thoughtful, civilized scholar, Hersey did not
seem prone to sensationalism. But he showed me a draft chapter from his
forthcoming book on the esthetics of racism that went even further than
the allegations in his letter to The Times. I was struck by one passage
in particular:

"From the outset, the purpose of these 'posture photographs' was
eugenic. The data accumulated, says Hooton, will eventually lead on to
proposals to 'control and limit the production of inferior and useless
organisms.' Some of the latter would be penalized for reproducing . . .
or would be sterilized. But the real solution is to be enforced better
breeding -- getting those Exeter and Harvard men together with their
corresponding Wellesley, Vassar and Radcliffe girls."

In other words, a kind of eugenic dating service, "Studs" for the
cultural elite. But my talk with Hersey left key questions unanswered.
What was the precise relationship between theorists like Hooton and
Sheldon (the man who actually took tens of thousands of those nude
posture photos) and the Ivy League and Seven Sisters schools whose
student bodies were photographed? Were the schools complicit or were
they simply dupes? And finally: What became of the photographs?

As for the last question, Hersey thought there'd be no trouble locating
the photographs. He assumed that "they can probably be found with
Sheldon's research papers" in one of the several academic institutions
with which he had been associated. But most of those institutions said
that they had burned whatever photos they'd had. Harley P. Holden,
curator of Harvard's archives, said that from the 1880's to the 1940's
the university had its own posture-photo program in which some 3,500
pictures of its students were taken. Most were destroyed 15 or 20 years
ago "for privacy scruples," Holden said. Nonetheless, quite a few
Harvard nudes can be found illustrating Sheldon's book on body types,
the "Atlas of Men." Radcliffe took posture photos from 1931 to 1961; the
curator there said that most of them had been destroyed (although some
might be missing) and that none were taken by Sheldon.

Hersey insisted that there was a treasure trove of Sheldon photographs
out there to be found. He gave me the phone number of a man in New
Mexico named Ellery Lanier, a friend of Sheldon, the posture-photo
mastermind. "He might know where they ended up," Hersey told me.

Going from Hersey to Lanier meant stepping over the threshold from
contemporary academic orthodoxy into the more exotic precincts of
Sheldon subculture, a loose-knit network of his surviving disciples. A
number of them keep the Sheldon legacy alive, hoping for a revival.

Lanier, an articulate, seventyish doctoral student at New Mexico State,
told me he'd gotten to know Sheldon at Columbia in the late 1940's, when
the two of them were hanging out with Aldous Huxley and Christopher
Isherwood and their crew. (Sheldon had a prophetic mystical side, which
revealed itself in Huxleian philosophic treatises on the "Promethean
will." Sheldon was also, Lanier told me, "the world's leading expert on
the history of the American penny.") At that time, Sheldon was at the
apex of his now-forgotten renown. Life magazine ran a cover story in
1951 on Sheldon's theory of somatotypes.

While the popular conception of Sheldonism has it that he divided human
beings into three types -- skinny, nervous "ectomorphs"; fat and jolly
"endomorphs"; confident, buffed "mesomorphs" -- what he actually did was
somewhat more complex. He believed that every individual harbored within
him different degrees of each of the three character components. By
using body measurements and ratios derived from nude photographs,
Sheldon believed he could assign every individual a three-digit number
representing the three components, components that Sheldon believed were
inborn -- genetic -- and remained unwavering determinants of character
regardless of transitory weight change. In other words, physique equals
destiny.

It was the pop-psych flavor of the month for a while; Cosmopolitan
magazine published quizzes about how to understand your husband on the
basis of somatotype. Ecto-, meso- and endomorphic have entered the
language, although few scientists these days give credence to Sheldon's
claims. "Half the textbooks in \[ his \] area fail to take \[ him \]
seriously," remarked one academician in a 1992 paper on Sheldon's
legacy. Others, like Hans Eysenck, the British psychologist, have
suggested that Sheldon wasn't really doing science at all, that he was
just winging it, that there was "little theoretical foundation for the
observed findings."

Nonetheless, in the late 40's and early 50's, Sheldonism seemed
mainstream, and Sheldon took advantage of that to approach Ivy League
schools. Many, like Harvard, already had a posture-photo tradition. But
it was at Wellesley College in the late 1920's that concern about
postural correctness metamorphosed into a cottage industry with
pretensions to science. The department of hygiene circulated training
films about posture measurement to other women's colleges, which took up
the practice, as did some "progressive" high schools and elementary
schools. (By the time Hillary Rodham arrived on the Wellesley campus,
women were allowed to have their pictures taken only partly nude.
Although Lanier assumes that Sheldon took the Rodham photo, Wellesley
archivists believe that Sheldon didn't take posture photos at their
school.)

What Sheldon did was appropriate the ritual. Lanier confirmed that the
Ivy League "posture photos" Sheldon used were "part of a facade or
cover-up for what we were really doing" -- which would make the schools
less complicit. But Lanier stoutly defended "what we were really doing"
as valid science. As part of his Ph.D. project, he has been examining
Sheldonian ecto-, meso- and endomorphic categories and the "time
horizon" of the individual.

"Conflicting temporal horizon can account for all the divorce we have
today," Lanier said. "The Woody Allen-Mia Farrow-type thing."

Huh? Woody and Mia?

"I'm trying to find some clue to the breakup because of the
discrepancies between their time focus," Lanier said.

"Well, Woody's certainly ectomorphic, but. . . . "

"No, let me correct you," Lanier said tartly. "Woody Allen creates an
illusion. He puts on a big show of being ectomorphic, but this is all a
cover-up because he's quite mesomorphic."

"I think he would be surprised to hear that."

"I know," Lanier said. "He wouldn't want to admit it, but the only way
you can know this is by looking at photographs very carefully."

Lanier also filled me in on the cause of Sheldon's downfall: his never
completed, partly burned "Atlas of Women." In attempting to compile what
would have been the companion volume to his "Atlas of Men," which
included hundreds of nude Harvard men to illustrate each of the
three-digit body types, Sheldon made the strategic mistake of taking his
photo show on the road.

What happened was this: In September 1950, Sheldon and his team
descended on Seattle, where the University of Washington had agreed to
play host to his project. He'd begun taking nude pictures of female
freshmen, but something went wrong. One of them told her parents about
the practice. The next morning, a battalion of lawyers and university
officials stormed Sheldon's lab, seized every photo of a nude woman,
convicted the images of shamefulness and sentenced them to burning. The
angry crew then shoveled the incendiary film into an incinerator. A
short-lived controversy broke out: Was this a book burning? A witch
hunt? Was Professor Sheldon's nude photography a legitimate scientific
investigation into the relationship between physique and temperament,
the raw material of serious scholarship? Or just raw material --
pornography masquerading as science?

They burned a few thousand photos in Seattle. Thousands more were burned
at Harvard, Vassar and Yale in the 60's and 70's, when the colleges
phased out the posture-photo practice. But thousands more escaped the
flames, tens of thousands that Sheldon took at Harvard, Vassar, Yale and
elsewhere but sequestered in his own archives. And what became of the
archives? Lanier didn't know, but he said they were out there somewhere.
He dug up the phone number of a man who was once the lawyer for
Sheldon's estate, a Mr. Joachim Weissfeld in Providence, R.I. "Maybe
he'll know," Lanier said.

At this point, the posture-photo quest turned into a kind of high-speed
parody of "The Aspern Papers." The lawyer in Rhode Island professed
ignorance as to the whereabouts or even continued existence of the lost
Sheldonian archives, but he did put me in touch with the last living
leaf on the Sheldon family tree, a niece by marriage who lived in
Warwick, R.I. She, too, said she didn't know what had become of the
Sheldon photos, but she did give me the name of an 84-year-old man
living in Columbus, Ohio, who had worked very closely with Sheldon, one
Roland D. Elderkin -- a man who, in fact, had shot many of the lost
photos himself and who promised to reveal their location to me. THE
MYSTERY SOLVED

With Roland D. Elderkin, we're now this close to the late, great Sheldon
himself. "There was nobody closer," Elderkin declared shortly after I
reached him at his rooming house in Columbus. "I was his soul mate."

Elderkin described himself a bit mournfully as "just an 84-year-old man
living alone in a furnished room." But he once had a brush with
greatness, and you can hear it in his recollection of Sheldon and his
grand project.

To Elderkin, Sheldon was no mere body-typer: he was a true philosophe,
"the first to introduce holistic perspective" to American science, a
proto-New Ager. Elderkin became Sheldon's research associate, his trusty
cameraman and a kind of private eye, compiling case histories of
Sheldon's posture nudes to confirm Sheldon's theories about physique and
destiny. He also witnessed Sheldon's downfall.

The Bonfire of the Nude Coed Photos in Seattle wasn't Sheldon's only
public burning, Elderkin told me: "He went through a number of furors
over women. A similar thing later happened at Pembroke, the women's
college at Brown." In each case, the fact that female nudes were
involved kindled the flame against Sheldon. Toward the end, Sheldon
became a kind of pathetic Willy Loman-esque figure as he wandered
America far from the elite Ivy halls that had once housed him, seeking a
place he could complete the photography for his "Atlas of Women."

Rejected and scorned, out of fashion with academic officialdom, Sheldon
is still a hero to Roland D. Elderkin. And so when Sheldon died in 1977,
"a lonely old man who did nothing his last years but sit in his room and
read detective stories," Elderkin said, "there was nobody else to carry
on." It fell to Elderkin to find a final resting place for the huge
archives of Sheldon's posture nudes.

It wasn't easy, he said. Elderkin went "up and down the East Coast
trying to peddle them" to places like Harvard and Columbia, which once
welcomed Sheldon but now wanted nothing to do with nude photos and the
controversy trailing them. "That's how I found out about the burning at
Pembroke," Elderkin recalled. "I was trying to get someone at Brown to
accept them, and he said, 'That filth? We already burned the ones we
had.' "

"And you know where they are now?" I asked incredulously. "Hersey and
Lanier said they didn't know."

"Sure I do," he said. "I was the one that finally found a home for
them."

And then he told me where.

BEFORE WE PROCEED TO the location of the treasure itself, it might be
wise to pause and ponder the wisdom of opening such a Pandora's box.
With scholars like Hersey alleging eugenic motives behind Sheldon's
project, with the self-images of so many of the cultural elite at stake,
would exposure of the hidden hoard be defensible? Is there anyone, aside
from lifelong Sheldon disciples, who will step forward to defend
Sheldon's posture photos?

Of course there is: Camille Paglia.

"I'm very interested in somatotypes," she said. "I constantly use the
term in my work. The word 'ectomorph' is used repeatedly in 'Sexual
Personae' about Spenser's Apollonian angels. That's one of the things
I'm trying to do: to reconsider these classification schemes, to rescue
them from their tainting by Nazi ideology. It's always been a part of
classicism. It's sort of like we've lost the old curiosity about
physical characteristics, physical differences. And I maintain it's
bourgeois prudery.

"See, I'm interested in looking at women's breasts\! I'm interested in
looking at men's penises\! I maintain that at the present date,
Penthouse, Playboy, Hustler, serve the same cultural functions as the
posture photos."

With these words ringing in my ears, I set out to see if I could open up
the Sheldon archives. THE SECRET IS BARED

Down a dimly lit back corridor of the National Museum of Natural History
in Washington, far from the dinosaur displays, is a branch of the
Smithsonian not well known to the public: the National Anthropological
Archives.

Although it contains a rich and strange assortment of archival
treasures, it's particularly notable for the number of Native Americans
who travel here to investigate centuries-old anthropological records,
poring over them in a cramped, windowless research room whose walls are
hung with stylized illustrations of tribal rituals painted by one Chief
Blue Eagle. It was here that my quest for another kind of tribal
illustration -- the taboo images of the blue-blood tribe, the long-lost
nude posture photos -- culminated at last.

In 1987, the curators of the National Anthropological Archives acquired
the remains of Sheldon's life work, which were gathering dust in "dead
storage" in a Goodwill warehouse in Boston. While there were solid
archival reasons for making the acquisition, the curators are clearly
aware that they harbor some potentially explosive material in their
storage rooms. And they did not make it easy for me to gain access.

On my first visit, I was informed by a good-natured but wary supervisor
that the restrictive grant of Sheldon's materials by his estate would
permit me to review only the written materials in the Sheldon archives.
The actual photographs, he said, were off-limits. To see them, I would
have to petition the chief of archivists. Determined to pursue the
matter to the bitter end, I began the process of applying for
permission.

Meanwhile, I plunged into the written material hoping to find answers to
several unresolved mysteries. Although I did not find substantiation in
those files for Hersey's belief that Sheldon was actively engaged in a
master-race eugenic project, I did find stunning confirmation of
Hersey's charge that Sheldon held racist views.

In Box 43 I came across a document never referred to in any of the
literature on Sheldon I'd seen. It was a faded offprint of a 1924
Sheldon study, "The Intelligence of Mexican Children." In it are damning
assertions presented as scientific truisms that "Negro intelligence"
comes to a "standstill at about the 10th year," Mexican at about age 12.
To the author of such sentiments, America's elite institutions entrusted
their student bodies.

Another box held clues to the truth behind Nora Ephron's tale about
smoking and organ size. It turned out to be true that a research arm of
the tobacco industry had sponsored studies on the relationship between
masculinity and smoking, and that the studies had involved Sheldonian
posture photos of Harvard men -- although there is no evidence that the
criterion of masculinity was the "obvious one" referred to by Ephron. I
located a fascinating report on this research in a December 1959 issue
of the respected journal Science, a report titled "Masculinity and
Smoking." According to the article, and contrary to the rumor, it is
"not strength but weakness of the masculine component" that is "more
frequent in the heavier smokers." Here, perhaps, is the most profound
cultural legacy of the Sheldonian posture-photo phenomenon: the
blueprint for the sexual iconography of tobacco advertising. If, in
fact, heavy smokers looked more like Harvard nerds than Marlboro men,
why not use advertising imagery to make Harvard nerds feel like virile
cowboys when they smoked?

Finally and most telling, I found a letter nearly four decades old that
did something nothing else in the files did. It gave a glimpse, a clue
to the feelings of the subjects of Sheldon's research, particularly the
women. I found the letter in a file of correspondence between Sheldon
and various phys ed directors at women's colleges who were providing
Sheldon with bodies for the ill-fated "Atlas of Women." In this letter,
an official at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, was responding to
Sheldon's request to rephotograph the female freshmen he had
photographed the year before. Something had apparently gone wrong with
the technical side of the earlier shoot. But the official refused to
allow Sheldon to reshoot the women, declaring that "to require them to
pose for another \[ nude posture photo \] would create insurmountable
psychological problems."

Insurmountable psychological problems. Suddenly the subjects of
Sheldon's photography leaped into the foreground: the shy girl, the fat
girl, the religiously conservative, the victim of inappropriate parental
attention. Here, perhaps, Naomi Wolf has a point. In a culture that
already encourages women to scrutinize their bodies critically, the
first thing that happens to these women when they arrive at college is
an intrusive, uncomfortable, public examination of their nude bodies.

THREE MONTHS LATER, I FINALLY SUCCEEDED IN gaining permission to study
the elusive posture photos. As I sat at my desk in the reading room,
under a portrait of Chief Blue Eagle, the long-sought cache
materialized. A curator trundled in a library cart from the storage
facility. Teetering on top of the cart were stacks of big, gray
cardboard boxes. The curator handed me a pair of the white cotton gloves
that researchers must use to handle archival material.

The contents of the boxes were described in an accompanying "Finder's
Aid" in this fashion: BOX 90 YALE UNIVERSITY CLASS OF 1971

Negatives. Full length views of nude freshmen men, front, back and rear.
Includes weight, height, previous or maximum weight, with age, name, or
initials. BOX 95 MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE PHOTOGRAPHS

Negatives. Made in 1950. Full length views of nude women, front, back
and rear. Includes height, weight, date and age. Includes some
photographs marked S.P.C.

Among the other classes listed in the Finder's Aid were: the Yale
classes of '50, '63, '64, '66 and '71; the Princeton class of '52; Smith
'50 and '52; Vassar '42 and '52; Mount Holyoke '53; Swarthmore '51;
University of California '61 and '67; Hotchkiss '71; Syracuse '50;
University of Wisconsin '53; Purdue '53; University of Pennsylvania '51,
and Brooklyn College '51 and '52. There were also undated photos from
the Oregon Hospital for the Criminally Insane (which I could not
distinguish in any way from the Ivy League photos). All told, there were
some 20,000 photographs of men -- 9,000 from Yale -- and 7,000 of women.

In flipping through those thousands of images (which were recently
transferred to Smithsonian archives in Suitland, Md.), I found
surprising testimony to the "insurmountable psychological problems" that
the Denison University official had referred to. It took awhile for the
"problems" to become apparent, because, as it turned out, I was not
permitted to see positive photographs -- only negatives (with no names
attached).

A fascinating distinction was being exhibited here, a kind of
light-polarity theory of prurience and privacy that absolves the
negative image of the naked body of whatever transgressive power it
might have in a positive print. There's an intuitive logic to the
theory, although here the Sheldon posture-photo phenomenon exposes how
fragile are the distinctions we make between the sanctioned and the
forbidden images of the body.

As I thumbed rapidly through box after box to confirm that the entries
described in the Finder's Aid were actually there, I tried to glance at
only the faces. It was a decision that paid off, because it was in them
that a crucial difference between the men and the women revealed itself.
For the most part, the men looked diffident, oblivious. That's not
surprising considering that men of that era were accustomed to
undressing for draft physicals and athletic-squad weigh-ins.

But the faces of the women were another story. I was surprised at how
many looked deeply unhappy, as if pained at being subjected to this
procedure. On the faces of quite a few I saw what looked like grimaces,
reflecting pronounced discomfort, perhaps even anger.

I was not much more comfortable myself sitting there in the midst of
stacks of boxes of such images. There I was at the end of my quest. I'd
tracked down the fabled photographs, but the lessons of the
posture-photo ritual were elusive.

"THERE'S A TREMENDOUS LESSON HERE," MISS manners declares. "Which is
that one should have sympathy and tolerance for respectable women from
whose past naked pictures suddenly show up. One should think of the many
times where some woman becomes prominent like Marilyn Monroe and
suddenly there are nude pictures in her past. Shouldn't we be a little
less condemning of someone in that position?"

A little less condemning of the victims, yes, certainly. (I speak as one
myself, although it turned out that my photo was burned in the Yale
bonfire of the late 70's.) But what about the perpetrators? What could
have possessed so many elite institutions of higher education to turn
their student bodies over to the practitioners of what now seems so
dubious a science project?

It's a question that baffles the current powers that be at Ivy League
schools. The response of Gary Fryer, Yale's spokesman, is
representative: "We searched, but there's nobody around now who was
involved with the decision." Even so, he assures me, nothing like it
could happen again; concerns about privacy have heightened, and, as he
puts it, "there's now a Federal law against disclosing anything in a
college student's record to any outsider without written permission."

In other words, "We won't get fooled again." Though he is undoubtedly
correct that nothing precisely like the posture-photo folly could happen
again, it is hard to deny the possibility, the likelihood, that
well-meaning people and institutions will get taken in -- are being
taken in -- by those who peddle scientific conjecture as certainty.
Sheldon's dream of reducing the complexity of human personality and the
contingency of human fate to a single number is a recurrent one, as the
continuing I.Q. controversy demonstrates. And a reminder that skepticism
is still valuable in the face of scientific claims of certainty,
particularly in the slippery realms of human behavior.

The rise and fall of "sciences" like Marxist history, Freudian
psychology and Keynesian economics suggests that at least some of the
beliefs and axioms treated as science today (Rorschach analysis,
"rational choice" economics, perhaps) will turn out to have little more
validity than nude stick-pin somatotyping.

In the Sheldon rituals, the student test subjects were naked -- but it
was the emperors of scientific certainty who had no clothes.

Photos: W. H. Sheldon, the posture-photo guru. Wellesley student (circa
1930) with posture-measuring pins. (FROM "THE VARIETIES OF HUMAN
PHYSIQUE."); Examples of Sheldon's endo-, meso- and ectomorphs, right.
(RESEARCH QUARTERLY/AAHPERD, FROM NEW YORK UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES)(pg.
26-27); Sheldon believed that photos like these could yield a
three-digit number to define a person's temperament. Insets: Wellesley
posture technicians and their laboratories circa 1930. (SINGLE POSTURE
PHOTO: FROM "ATLAS OF MEN," FROM NEW YORK UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES.
TRIPTYCHS: FROM "THE VARIETIES OF HUMAN PHYSIQUE." INSETS: RESEARCH
QUARTERLY/AAHPERD.)(pgh. 28-29); Whether scandal or folly, the strange
phenomenon of the nude "posture photos" is also a kind of touchstone for
registering attitudes toward body, race and gender in the past
half-century. (SINGLE POSTURE PHOTO: FROM "ATLAS OF MEN." TRIPTYCHS,
LEFT AND SECOND FROM RIGHT: FROM "ATLAS OF MEN"; OTHERS: FROM "THE
VARIETIES OF HUMAN PHYSIQUE." INSETS: RESEARCH QUARTERLY/AAHPERD.)(pg.
30-31)
