The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal

First off, I didn't know the appropriate forum to put this in.
Also, I did a thorough search and couldn't find anything, but feel free to delete if need be.

Harvard and Yale! These are supposed to be the best of the best. To think that something like this could slip under the radar blows my mind. Even after reading the article I still don't understand what value these pictures would have to anyone besides a pervert. It even goes on to compare this to archives compiled by the Nazis during Hitlers reign.

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.

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.

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."

My question is, what's the TRUE story? There has to be something more to it than explained.
What do you guys think? Has anyone heard of this before? (considering it's quite old)

nytimes.com

reply to post by GmoS719


Yale you say? You sure it wasn't Penn State?

Originally posted by webpirate
reply to post by GmoS719

 

Yale you say? You sure it wasn't Penn State?

Lol, I'm sure. This goes deeper than just some creepy old man.

reply to post by GmoS719


Yeah...I'm afraid the whole Penn State thing was just the tip of the iceberg. This is liable to be more widespread and deeper than even the Catholic Church could imagine.

Wow, you are right... it isn't a story known!

I suppose you could say it was reversed eugenics, meaning that instead of proving the sub quality of a specie, an idea unpopular at the time, to some degree, it was used to find the most adequate subjects for, let's say, puppetry...

Maybe the willingness to comply to all the weirdness of the "experiment" was a determining factor more than the nudity. And what's with the four pins on the spine? Another weird element to see the ability to keep docile in front of such a surprising element? I'm not talking about the docility of complying, but the docility of the appearance.

Maybe that is why it is(was) hard for women to go high in politics, because too many showed a negative emotion, or one that couldn't be politically used to convey a given message. You can't have that with hysteria...

As for the tobacco thing... I guess both sides were of their time. I saw old commercials with doctors saying smoking was good for the health. Then, a few decades later, it's "in" to bash on smokers. The Science magazine, as any other commercially based thing has to roll with what the advisers want. ( As example, try talking about Mary-Jane, Spider-Man's wife, in a thread, here. You can't anymore... )

I agree it must have been a painful thought for the women who went through that "experiment". But at the same time, I'm glad the Smithsonian kept some of the files. Over time, they may have some real scientific raison d'être, for who knows what.

As a last word, if the schools knew about it, they either believed in some form of eugenicist possibility, or some organization believing it paid for the schools to look the other way.
I find it too convenient for the schools to have "disappeared" the evidence of those past activities in which they were involved, even if minutely.

It's like asking Dexter to clean his own crime scene... The pictures should have been given back to each one of the students to dispose of as they see fit. That way, you can be sure it is gone.

Otherwise, they can still be held by someone who is still using them as comparison tools... who knows!

Thanks for the link!

There was some small controversy about this some years back (I can't remember how long). Someone had obliquely referred to the existence of these posture photos, and I do remember that Hillary Clinton's name came up--and I believe some other famous and semi-famous names. I'm intrigued now. I think I'll see if I can find some more information on it.

I would also note that the elementary school I went to in the early- to mid-60s did these posture photos. The photos were converted to (I think) white-on-black silhouettes and printed; the student's posture was rated on a scale of some sort, and the pictures put into sealed manila envelopes for the student to take home to the parents. (I believe there was also a printed "key" to the types of posture, with some prescriptives for correction.) There were no metal pins as mentioned in the article....

Yes, here it is. 2007, actually.
Hot Nekkid Hillary Clinton Photo

Note that this writer directly (and mistakenly) contradicts some of the more professional research in the OP's article. For example:

This now discredited anthropological research, which began as far back as the 1880s, was conducted by W.H. Sheldon who headed an institute for physique studies at Colombia University. In fact, it is possible that Sheldon himself was the one who beheld Hillary in all her natural glory since he often took the photographs.

The article linked to by the OP says several times that Sheldon never took any of the photos.

Also:

....the tobacco industry, using Sheldon's nude photos, conducted research into the relation between Talleywacker size and smoking.

This was thoroughly and professionally discredited by the author in the OP's link. I'm sure there are more mentions out there--none of which are nearly as well-written or professionally researched as the OP's source....