IN the unforgiving fluorescent light of Rosenfeld Hall, a dormitory on the periphery of Yale’s campus, students crouched in a hallway and quickly stuffed their clothes into plastic grocery bags. Shirts were left inside out, socks balled in pant legs. Giggling, they hurried into a basement storage room, where some 40 people stood around, under stone arches and gargoyles, wearing nothing but shoes.

Lighted only by tea candles, the party had the afterglow of a literary reading: Students chatted in small groups, drifting toward the darkest parts of the room. Arms held tight to the body, eyes unwavering from face level, they drank and smoked and talked about the fact that they were naked: “I’m so pale.” “You look radiant.” “The air feels weird without clothes — skin is this big sense organ.”

This was no bacchanal. A few students danced, with less body contact than normal, and the men seemed more self-conscious than the women. When a couple started making out in the back of the room, a barefoot member of the Pundits, the student society that threw the party, asked them to leave.

“Person-to-space ratio is very, very important,” he explained dispassionately. (He would not give his name because the Pundits don’t want the Yale administration to know who they are.) He had spent part of the night shuttling people from a meeting place in the center of campus to the party at Rosenfeld Hall. “We want to make sure throngs of people aren’t streaming in at once,” he said. “Also, part of it is just the mystique of not knowing where you’re going. It’s become sort of a hip thing to do around here.”