No matter what embarrassments Harvard students might face in their first few weeks on campus, none will be as mortifying as posing for nude photos, which used to be as much a part of the college registration process as scheduling classes and choosing a dorm.

For decades, thousands of students at Harvard and other prestigious schools would arrive on campus, strip down, and pose in front of a camera with four-inch metal pins sticking out of their spines, essentially turning them into human porcupines.

The practice of taking “posture photos’’ was common from the 1940s to the 1970s. That means photos may still somewhere exist of students of that era including Hillary Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Meryl Streep, Bob Woodward and Diane Sawyer — all of whom attended schools that took nudes in the name of “science.’’


It all began in 1880, when the Harvard Physical Education Department took nude photos of all freshmen. At this time, there were no women at Harvard. The Crimson noted that being nude in college actually wasn’t that weird. Men did swimming races in nothing but their birthday suits because it was considered more “hygienic.’’

The photo practice continued unabated until 1940, when Harvard researcher William Sheldon co-opted the program and turned it into a “somatotyping campaign.’’ This meant he assigned each student one of three labels to describe his body type. Supposedly, Sheldon wanted to photograph the intellectual elite to show what their physiques looked like because he believed they would be indicative of their personalities, according to The Crimson.

But, as The New York Times explored 20 years ago in article called “The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal,’’some don’t think Sheldon’s motives were purely scientific.

The late George Hersey, who was an art history professor at Yale when the article was written, said the real reason was eugenics. He claimed that “the real solution is to be enforced better breeding — getting those Exeter and Harvard men together with their corresponding Wellesley, Vassar and Radcliffe girls.’’

That’s right. Hersey believed the photos would serve as a kind of matchmaking service for the hottest Ivy Leaguers. But the practice spread beyond the Ivy League to schools including Vassar, Wellesley and Smith. The Crimson said about 46,000 individuals were also photographed nude at military and medical institutions over the years.


Sheldon was able to continue his practice uninterrupted until 1950, when a horrified female freshman at the University of Washington told her parents about the picture she’d been required to take. According to the Times, “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.’’

A few thousand photos were burned right then and there in Seattle, and more would be destroyed in the ’60s and ’70s as “posture photos’’ were phased out. Sheldon would die in the late ’70s without much other than the obscure photos to show for his theories about body shape and personality.

The thousands of photos that weren’t burned are housed in the Smithsonian archives. (But, in case you’re hoping to sneak a peek at the nudes of former Ivy Leaguers, know that they’re only available to researchers and museum personnel).

Nowadays, students at Harvard still strip down, but at least they’re running around naked and screaming by choice.

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