The Ivy League nude posture photos were taken in the 1940s through the 1970s of all incoming freshmen at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, UPenn (which are members of the Ivy League) and Seven Sisters colleges (as well as Swarthmore), ostensibly to gauge the rate and severity of rickets, scoliosis, and lordosis in the population. The photos are simple black-and-white images of each individual standing upright from front, back and side perspectives.

• “Nude Photos Are Sealed At Smithsonian”. New York Times. 1995-01-21. Retrieved 2008-03-11. The Smithsonian Institution has cut off all public access to a collection of nude photographs taken of generations of college students, some of whom went on to become leaders in American culture and government. The pictures at first were taken to study posture. Later they were made by a researcher examining what he believed to be a relationship between body shape and intelligence.
• Ron Rosenbaum (1995-01-15). “The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal”. New York Times. Retrieved 2008-03-11. 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.

Harvard previously had its own such program from the 1880s to the 1940s.

• Ron Rosenbaum (1995-01-15). “The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal”. New York Times. Retrieved 2008-03-11. 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 larger project was run by William Herbert Sheldon and Earnest Albert Hooton, who may have been using the data to support their theory on body types and social hierarchy.

• Vertinsky, P. (2007). “Physique as destiny: William H. Sheldon, Barbara Honeyman Heath, and the struggle for hegemony in the science of somatotyping”. Canadian Bulletin of Medical History. 24 (2): 291–316. doi:10.3138/cbmh.24.2.291. PMID 18447308.

What remained of the images were transferred to the Smithsonian, and most were destroyed between 1995 and 2001. However, starting in 2020, hundreds of photos of male freshman from Yale have gone up for sale individually on eBay, ensuring that many remain in private collections.

• “Nude Photos Are Sealed At Smithsonian”. New York Times. 1995-01-21. Retrieved 2008-03-11. The Smithsonian Institution has cut off all public access to a collection of nude photographs taken of generations of college students, some of whom went on to become leaders in American culture and government. The pictures at first were taken to study posture. Later they were made by a researcher examining what he believed to be a relationship between body shape and intelligence.
• Nude Photos of Yale Graduates Are Shredded”. New York Times. 1995-01-29. Retrieved 2008-03-11. The Smithsonian Institution has destroyed nude photographs taken decades ago of Yale University students who were unaware the pictures were to be used in the pursuit of a form of science. The science has since been discredited.
• “MEDICAL IVY LEAGUE YALE UNIVERSITY SCANDAL NUDE POSTURE PHOTO & NEG MALE 1949 H”. eBay. Retrieved 2021-06-08.
• “MEDICAL IVY LEAGUE YALE UNIVERSITY SCANDAL NUDE POSTURE PHOTO & NEG MALE 1949 C”. eBay. Archived from the original on 2021-06-08. Retrieved 2021-06-08.
• “MEDICAL SCIENCE YALE UNIVERSITY IVY LEAGUE SCANDAL POSTURE PHOTO & NEG MALE 1946”. eBay. Retrieved 2021-06-08.
• says, Robert Kazmayer (2021-05-18). “The Yale Posture Photos: James Franciscus”. Brian Ferrari’s Blog. Retrieved 2022-03-13.

Schools involved

• Brooklyn College
• Harvard University
• Hotchkiss School
• Mount Holyoke College
• Purdue University
• Princeton University
• Radcliffe College
• Smith College
• Swarthmore College
• Syracuse University
• University of California
• University of Pennsylvania
• University of Wisconsin
• Vassar College
• Wellesley College
• Yale University

Dick Cavett on his experience

Getting just a little serious for a moment, there are some astonishing facts here, one being: nobody protested. I never heard of a single case of anyone at any school saying they flatly refused to participate in this loony, outrageous, forced violation of individual privacy….I’m sure there are conclusions to be drawn here by deeper thinkers than I about obedience to authority, reluctance to rock boats with protest, etc. People hearing of this crazy caper on the part of major American universities say, “I wouldn’t have stood for this for a second!” If that’s true, why did everybody go along back then? Were admissions committees’ principles of selection inadvertently selecting the meek in vast numbers? Were “the times” so different?…Full disclosure department: I’ve never heard of anyone who saw his own picture. But I did. One of my roommates, Ron Wille, had the dubious honor of having as his scholarship job developing the damned things and sneaked me mine, temporarily. In it, I looked cowed. And there was about it a redolence of something greatly unpleasant, not immediately identified, having to do with the stark lighting (and the stark nakedness) and the chart and the pins that, combined, supplied a whiff of — not to get too melodramatic about it — the concentration camp. Finally, doesn’t all this vast embarrassment and fuss about a word you stop hearing as a third grader — “posture” — seem just a touch on the nutty side? If you think so, you may have guessed it. There is another whole, hidden dimension to this story. The word “scandal” applies. And “sinister” is not entirely inappropriate.

Dick Cavett, Up Against the Wall, New York Times, November 11, 2011

See also

• Nudity portal
• Somatotype and constitutional psychology

External links

• Dick Cavett on his experience