Naked Orientation: When Yale Freshmen Were Photographed Nude

Summary

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Episode Summary: Naked Orientation – When Yale Freshmen Were Photographed Nude

Podcast: Campus Files: Scandals, Secrets & Crimes at American Universities
Host: Margo Gray
Date: March 11, 2026

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Main Theme

This episode uncovers the forgotten—and deeply unsettling—history of "posture photos" taken of naked freshmen at Yale and other American universities from the 1940s to the 1970s. Through firsthand accounts, expert interviews, and historical deep dives, the episode explores why this practice began, how it spread, the cultural and scientific rationales behind it, and the controversies that led to its quiet demise—and then resurfaced in public outrage decades later.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Discovery of the Secret Archive (01:05)

• In the late 1970s, a Yale employee stumbled upon a locked room in the gym. He found "thousands of photographs of naked young men shot from the front side and profiles," stored for decades. The staff quickly shredded and burned them, hoping to erase the practice from history.
• Margo Gray (01:57):
  "They wanted to make it all disappear. But that history wouldn’t stay hidden for long."

2. A Freshman’s Experience (Richard Senecal, Yale class of 1969) (02:28 - 09:45)

• Richard Senecal recalls arriving at Yale from Fargo, North Dakota, and feeling out of place at the elite institution.
• The expected rituals baffled him—especially being instructed to strip nude for a posture evaluation.
• Richard Senecal (06:54):
  "I can still feel that little old man's fingertips prodding my body, looking for spots to put the black marker. That was a very strange experience."
• Once he and other public school peers compared notes, they recognized how unsettling the procedure was. However, "no one objected" because the culture was not rebellious yet.

3. Cultural and Historical Context: Why Posture? (09:45 - 17:13)

• Dr. Beth Linker, historian and author of Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America, explains the origins.
• In the early 20th century, poor posture was thought to cause medical problems—especially tuberculosis—and reflected moral character.
• Dr. Beth Linker (15:01):
  "In medical theory at this time…they start to make links between poor posture and one of the greatest killers of the day, tuberculosis."
• Posters and campaigns linked posture with national health, military readiness, and leadership, resulting in posture as shorthand for physical fitness.

4. Nationwide Ritual and “Corrective” Classes (17:13 - 20:15)

• Physical exams, including posture photos, became standard across elite and state colleges, even historically black colleges.
• If students failed, they were assigned posture correction classes.
• Dr. Beth Linker (19:28):
  "A student would work on crawling and walking and standing and perfecting their posture. And for some students, this was two years of physical education."

5. The End of Posture Photos (20:15 - 24:37)

• Multiple factors converged in the late 1960s and early 1970s:
  • Feminist Movement: Protests and direct challenges at women’s colleges led to the abandonment of the practice.
  • Disability Rights Movement: Advocacy for access and ending physical mandates.
  • FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, 1974): New privacy standards forced universities to rethink record-keeping.
• Universities began quietly destroying the archives of nude photos.
• Dr. Beth Linker (23:37):
  "All of these things come together to make it so that something like a practice of taking nude photographs of university students and keeping a record…seemed anathema to the spirit of the times."

6. Controversy Reignited: The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal (1995) (24:37 - 28:57)

• A 1995 New York Times article by Ron Rosenbaum revealed not only the existence but the use of these photos by psychologist William H. Sheldon, who developed "somatotyping”—a now discredited system classifying personalities by body type, often leaning into pseudo-scientific and discriminatory ideas.
• Sheldon procured negatives from multiple institutions and included them in his research archived at the Smithsonian.
• Ivan Berger (32:07):
  "This is very, very boring if you are a straight guy…it's one pudgy-looking guy after another. God, did I know what naked men look like."
• When alumni discovered their images might still exist, many were furious, and universities scrambled to ensure destruction at the Smithsonian.

7. The Photographer's Perspective (Ivan Berger, Yale class of 1961) (30:25 - 33:50)

• Former student photographer Ivan Berger describes the mundane but surreal experience of taking and developing hundreds of nude photos ("position the subject, click the button…next").
• He also confirms making duplicate copies for Dr. Sheldon, never considering privacy concerns at the time.
• Ivan Berger (32:58):
  "No, no, we weren’t as privacy-oriented back then because there weren’t as many distributions available…Whereas now they could post it on Facebook."

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Richard Senecal on culture shock (04:59):
  "There wasn’t a thing that happened on any given day that wasn’t outside of my experience."
• Margo Gray on historical context (09:45):
  "From the 1940s through the 1960s, posture evaluations were standard practice…tens of thousands of photographs of nude freshmen stored in university archives. Personally, I’d never heard of any of this before researching this episode."
• Dr. Beth Linker on archival destruction (24:15):
  "A lot of colleges are not going to have the money to put these photographs in archival holdings…they had a suspicion, especially with FERPA, that it wasn’t going to look too good if these photographs got in the wrong hands."
• Richard Senecal on reflecting decades later (29:04):
  "That would be kind of embarrassing to have out there, but maybe less so for me than some of my other compatriots…Although nowadays I might be glad to see how young and fit I was at that age."

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Important Timestamps

• 01:05 — Discovery of Yale posture photo archive and its destruction
• 02:28 — Richard Senecal's arrival at Yale and orientation experience
• 06:54 — Description of posture exam and emotional impact
• 09:45 — Expansion to other universities, prevalence of nude photographs
• 12:46 — Dr. Beth Linker introduces history and public health context
• 15:01 — The tuberculosis/posture link in early medical theory
• 19:07 — The shift from manual tracing to photography
• 20:39 — Practice widespread, not just elite institutions
• 21:47 — Feminist and disability activism; beginning of the end
• 23:37 — FERPA and the destruction of archives
• 24:37 — 1995 NYT article; William Sheldon's use of photos; alumni outrage
• 30:25 — Ivan Berger's job as a student photographer of nude freshmen
• 32:38 — Duplicates for Dr. Sheldon, changing attitudes toward privacy

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Tone and Style

• The episode maintains a curious, investigative, and empathetic tone, with a mix of first-person storytelling and expert commentary.
• Speakers reflect both bemusement and discomfort, underscoring how ordinary students were swept up in an institutional practice that now seems bizarre and invasive.

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Takeaway

What began as a well-intentioned public health measure rooted in now-obsolete medical theories quietly became a widespread—and deeply personal—ritual for generations of American college students, only to be expunged after changing cultural values and privacy standards forced a reckoning. The story remains a powerful reminder of how institutional authority can shape, and sometimes violate, the private lives of individuals in pursuit of scientific or social ideals.

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Transcript

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

Hey, Sal.

[Carvana Spokesperson (Hank)]

Hank.

[Richard Senecal]

What's going on?

[Carvana Spokesperson (Hank)]

We haven't worked a case in years.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

I just bought my car at Carvana,

[Ivan Berger]

and it was so easy.

[Richard Senecal]

Too easy.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

Think something's up?

[Ivan Berger]

You tell me.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

They got thousands of options, found a great car at a great price, and it got delivered the next day. It sounds like Carvana just makes it easy to buy your car, Hank. Yeah, you're right. Case closed. Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply.

[Jill Schlesinger]

Hi, this is Jill Schlesinger, CBS News business analyst, certified financial planner, and the host of the Jill on Money podcast. With the new year upon us, there's no better time to take control of your financial life. And the Jill on Money podcast is here to help. It's your questions that make it possible for me to provide unconventional and, I hope, entertaining insights on your money and, more importantly, on your life. Follow and listen to Jill on Money wherever you get your podcasts.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

One afternoon in the late 1970s, a Yale employee noticed a locked door in the gym. He was curious, so he opened it. The room looked like it hadn't been touched for decades. Inside, he found boxes, stacks of them. And inside those boxes, photographs. Thousands of photographs of naked young men shot from the front side and profiles. The employee didn't know what to make of it, so he brought the athletic director down to see. The director didn't know either. But after some digging, they realized they'd uncovered the remnants of a strange chapter of Yale's history. And they acted quickly. Every photograph was shredded. Then, for extra precaution, the shreds were burned. All to ensure that no recognizable images of these Yale students would survive. They wanted to make it all disappear. But that history wouldn't stay hidden for long. I'm Margo Gray. This week on Campus Files, the forgotten history of posture photos on America's college campuses.

[Richard Senecal]

I grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, and you will never find a place more homogeneous or more boringly normal than Fargo.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

This is Richard Senecal. By his senior year of high school in 1965, he was more than ready to leave his hometown of Fargo, North Dakota, behind. He had the credentials. He was a National Merit Scholar, top of his class. But that didn't make the college application process any less daunting.

[Richard Senecal]

When it came time to think about going to college, I didn't really have any help. My parents were supportive, but they had really no knowledge or any ability to assist me. So I was doing this entire process by myself.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

But Richard did just fine on his own. He applied to seven Ivy League schools in Stanford and got into all of them. He ended up picking Yale. He wanted to be an architect, and a brand new Yale building had just graced the COVID of Time magazine. So in September 1965, he and his dad packed up the car and drove east to New Haven, Connecticut. Two days and 1500 miles later, Richard and his dad arrived at Yale. It was one of those perfect early fall days, the leaves just starting to change color.

[Richard Senecal]

I'd never seen the campus, and other than a few pictures in Yale promotional materials, didn't really know what it looked like. And there wasn't anything grand in Fargo at all. The tallest building in Fargo was six stories. So everything when I hit the campus, I went, my God, this is gorgeous. And I was just stunned.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

It wasn't only the beauty of the campus that surprised him. From the start, Richard says, he felt like a stranger in a strange land.

[Richard Senecal]

I knew nothing about the east coast, nothing about New England. I mean, North Dakota is as far from Yale as you can possibly get.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

For starters, Richard was confused why so many of his classmates somehow knew each other already. He discovered that many of them, the preppies, as he calls them, had come from the same small circle of elite prep schools. And then there was the uniform. Yale had instructed freshmen to wear a coat and tie to class, so Richard had dutifully purchased a whole new wardrobe. But when he showed up, he learned there was an unspoken memo. Everyone actually wore tweed jackets with elbow patches and a deliberately rumpled tie.

[Richard Senecal]

There wasn't a thing that happened on any given day that wasn't outside of my experience.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

But one thing in particular felt completely outside his experience. It began when he got instructions to report to Yale's main gymnasium, Payne Whitney.

[Richard Senecal]

It's a massive high rise building with multiple indoor pools and indoor running tracks and weight rooms and bunches of locker rooms. And, you know, we called Payne Whitney the Catedral d', espoire, because if you've seen the building, it's a high rise gothic building that could easily pass for a French cathedral.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

Richard learned that he'd have to go through a whole series of tests, starting with a fitness assessment. And he was nervous. He wasn't exactly the athletic type.

[Richard Senecal]

And as it turns out, I passed the sit up and push up part of the fitness test, but I failed the pull up part and so was assigned to six weeks of remediate exercise until I could do the requisite number of pull ups.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

This portion of the evaluation didn't surprise Richard. He'd had his share of sit up and pull up tests in High school. But the next part did. They were going to evaluate his posture.

[Richard Senecal]

I recall being shuffled into a locker room and told to strip nude. Now, that in itself was not immediately troublesome, because at my high school, the boys swam nude.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

And Jim, yes, you heard that. Right until the 1970s, nude swimming was standard for high school boys across much of the country. In fact, the American public Health association formally recommended nude swimming as part of good pool management.

[Richard Senecal]

So I thought, well, okay. But then I walked into this windowless room, and there were three gnomish little old men there.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

Two of the men stood off to the side, observing. The third motioned for him to step

[Richard Senecal]

onto a platform while I stood there, took a grease pencil, and felt all over my body, looking for the bone points, the point at which various joints and bones were closest to the surface. Shoulders, shoulder blades, vertebra, hip bones, joints, knees, elbows, whatever. And marked each of those spots with a black grease pencil. I can still feel that little old man's fingertips prodding my body, looking for spots to put the black marker. That was a very strange experience.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

There were a few mirrors positioned around him. So one photograph captured three angles. Front, back, and profile. Richard stood still as the camera flashed.

[Richard Senecal]

By this point, it was pretty disturbing. But, you know, again, everything was new and different for me. I just assumed, well, this is the way they do it on the east coast. And it was just me that was not in tune with the reality of this grand Ivy League institution.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

But when Richard got back to his dorm, he started talking about the photos with some of the guys on his hall. And it turned out he wasn't the only person who'd found it.

[Richard Senecal]

Weird as it happened, the guys in the suite next to mine had also been to public high schools, and we were sort of comparing notes, going, boy, was that weird. And that's about the first time that it really sunk in how strange and invasive that posture evaluation had been. Now, I think it may not have been as big a surprise to the preppies who had older brothers, who'd gone to Yale, whose fathers had gone to Yale, who, you know, who knew the culture and probably went, yeah, ho hum, right?

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

Richard's hunch is right. I talked to several alumni whose fathers or older brothers had also gone to Yale, the preppies, as Richard likes to call them. And they'd all heard about the posture photos before they arrived on campus. Some had actually been coached on how to pose so they'd be more likely to pass the posture evaluation. But even for the preppies, knowing what was coming didn't make it any less unsettling. And yet everyone went along with it. No one I spoke to could recall a single student objecting to the photos.

[Richard Senecal]

Times were very different. You know, we were straight arrow kids. We grew up in church and home and school. We were taught to follow rules and to do what your elders told you. And nobody had started to rebellion. The 60s that you think of as the 60s didn't start until probably about 67 when suddenly the Vietnam War really triggered whole social change and activism and what have you. Nobody would have said no. Not going to do that just was not. We didn't start saying no until about 67, when it was a question of life or death.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

And it wasn't just Yale students who went along with this. From the 1940s through the 1960s, posture evaluations were standard practice at colleges and universities across the country. We're talking tens of thousands of photographs of nude freshmen stored in university archives. Personally, I'd never heard of any of this before researching this episode, and the more I learned, the more questions I had, the first being why did schools care about their students posture in the first place?

[Yasmin Vesugian]

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[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

From today's perspective. Richard's freshman orientation at Yale was, well, strange. Even the fitness test part of it. Imagine showing up to college and getting tested on pull ups, push ups and sit ups. Why did Yale care? Here's how Richard explains it.

[Richard Senecal]

Yale in the 60s was dedicated to raising the next thousand male leaders. It was all male institution. It was directed at creating the next round of politicians and bank presidents and famous lawyers and doctors. And so this was just part of an overall training to make you into that mold.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

I still don't know why my future doctor or lawyer needs to do pull ups, but I get the idea. Yale wanted the next generation of American leaders to be physically fit. What I can't understand is why posture mattered so much. So much so that students were tested on it and had to take classes if they failed. So I reached out to a historian for answers. Dr. Beth Lenker.

[Dr. Beth Lenker]

I'm a professor in the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania, and I'm the author, most recently, of the book Slouch Posture, Panic in modern America.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

Dr. Linker wasn't planning on writing a book about posture. She stumbled on the topic while doing research for another book at the national archives in Washington, D.C. i was looking

[Dr. Beth Lenker]

at World War I. I was looking at the birth of rehabilitation as a form of aftercare for disabled soldiers. So I opened this box and it was just a bunch of tracing paper with footprints on it. And I was like, what is this?

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

It turned out that those footprints belonged to World War I draftees. The military had taken them as part of the medical screening process. At the time, flat feet were considered a disability. Men with low arches were routinely rejected for military service. And flat feet weren't the only thing that could disqualify you from joining the Army. A posture defect could too.

[Dr. Beth Lenker]

It could be asymmetrical shoulders. It could be leg length difference. It could be swayed back. It could be hunched over something called pigeon chest, which was kind of a concave chest. So all of those things could have fallen under a postural defect.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

So you could be rejected from the draft simply for having bad posture and not because the army cared about how commanding you looked in a uniform, but because of a widely accepted idea at the time that posture was tied to overall health.

[Carvana Spokesperson (Hank)]

Poor posture may be a sign of something wrong with you. You may be run down physically or overtired or upset. You need a thorough checkup by your family doctor to discover the cause of your posture defects.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

The belief was that slouching didn't just look bad, it made you physically weaker and more susceptible to illness.

[Carvana Spokesperson (Hank)]

If you Usually slump. The health of the whole body is affected. Our skeletons and muscles are designed to support our vital organs so that they can do their best work. If we sag, these organs are pushed out of their proper positions.

[Dr. Beth Lenker]

In medical theory at this time in the early 20th century, they start to make links between poor posture and one of the greatest killers of the day, tuberculosis. And what they argue is that if somebody has a slouching or slumping posture, their breathing and respiratory capacity is compromised and therefore slouching would lead to tuberculosis.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

It became a national public health campaign. Posters went up in schools, doctors offices, factories. One poster read, poor posture encourages tuberculosis. Erect carriage combats it.

[Carvana Spokesperson (Hank)]

What is good posture? How can you make it a habit? Like a lot of boys and girls, Your posture is your problem. What are you going to do about it?

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

This wasn't fringe thinking. It was being promoted by academics at some of the most elite campuses in the country. There was even an organization called the American Posture League that was made up largely of Ivy League professors. At Yale, one prominent professor blamed his own tuberculosis on his hunched back. And at Harvard in 1917, a physician led the first large scale systematic study of posture. It was called the Harvard Slouch study.

[Dr. Beth Lenker]

The Harvard Slouch study was the only posture that counted as good posture was this like perfect plumb line vertical posture. So he found that 80% of Harvard students had poor posture.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

The Harvard Slouch study helped spark a full blown posture obsession on college campuses. And that obsession outlasted the threat of tuberculosis. Even after antibiotics became widely available in the mid-1940s, the focus on posture didn't fade. The thinking around it just changed.

[Dr. Beth Lenker]

The infectious disease part kind of went away and instead morphs into this concern about bad posture is bad for more chronic conditions. So cardiac conditions, diabetes, obesity, in other

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

words, good posture became something of a shorthand for being physically fit. And in the mid 20th century, physical fitness mattered a lot. The country had just survived two world wars and was now heading into the Cold war. National strength and military readiness were being talked about in terms of physical preparedness.

[Carvana Spokesperson (Hank)]

Are you ready physically for this training? Your body's got to be able to take it because service means new physical demands on strength and endurance. That's why in military training can't afford

[Dr. Beth Lenker]

to kind of become flabby and we need to keep our bodies hardened for any future wars. So especially for men, but for women, about kind of birthing the next generation

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

of fitness Americans, universities had a crucial role to play. They were raising the future leaders of the free world. Leaders who needed to be physically prepared. So in the 50s and 60s, physical fitness tests became routine on college campuses, Built into orientation programs, PE Classes. Medical screenings for incoming students, and posture exams became a key part of those tests. At schools across the country, the exact nature of the posture exams differed from campus to campus and year to year. At some places, an examiner simply looked you up and down and took notes. Other campuses used tools like the schematic, A device that allowed examiners to manually trace a student's silhouette.

[Dr. Beth Lenker]

Eventually, camera photography would win out, Partly because it was cheaper as the 20th century progressed, and also it was seen as more scientific because tracing is done by the human hand, and so that looks a little bit more backward, a little bit less modern, not as hardcore scientific.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

In most cases, students posed nude for these posture photographs. Maybe, if they were lucky, in a bathing suit or halter top. The camera captured every angle, Front, back, profile. Examiners then scrutinized the images. And at most schools, if your posture didn't meet the ideal standard, you were sent to corrective classes.

[Dr. Beth Lenker]

A student would work on crawling and walking and standing and perfecting their posture. And for some students, this was two years of physical education.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

Remember Richard? He ended up failing his posture exam. So he had to take these classes during his freshman year at Yale. He can't recall exactly how long the program lasted, but. But he's certain it stretched on for at least several weeks. Once he finished, though, he says he more or less forgot about the whole thing.

[Richard Senecal]

It just sort of disappeared from memory. There was so much more going on. You can imagine the change in your life at 17, where you go far away from home and enter a completely foreign environment, and everything takes an adjustment. That one occurrence kind of drifted into the past pretty quickly.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

Richard didn't think about those posture photos for decades. Then something made him remember and begin to rethink everything. By the 1960s, posture photography had become standard practice at universities across the country.

[Dr. Beth Lenker]

These posture exams are happening in historically black colleges. They happened in a lot of state universities. This was not just an ivy league phenomenon.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

Thousands of students were photographed naked each year. At Yale, that included George Bush and Bob Woodward at Wellesley, Hillary Clinton and Diane Sawyer at Vassar, Meryl Streep. At most schools, a majority of freshmen failed the test. They were told that they had posture problems and needed to take remedial classes. So for countless American college students, these posture classes became something of a rite of passage. But the whole practice was living on borrowed time. By the end of the 1960s, poster photographs were on their way out. In fact, by the time Richard graduated From Yale in 1969, freshmen were no longer subjected to these photographs. So what happened? Dr. Linker says that there wasn't a single moment that ended it. Instead, a handful of forces quietly converged. One of them was the feminist movement.

[Jill Schlesinger]

A new movement for women's liberation is launched, and once again, protesters take to the street to support their demands for total freedom, economically, politically, socially.

[Dr. Beth Lenker]

Remember, the feminist movement is already having protests at the Miss America contest.

[Carvana Spokesperson (Hank)]

Inside, one set of young women accepted the chauvinist baubles. Outside, others carried on with more consciousness raising.

[Dr. Beth Lenker]

We have bra burning. We have all of that going on. And there's just no way that, especially at these all women's colleges, that anybody is going to stand for a posture examination.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

At Cornell University, a group of female students staged a quiet rebellion. They stole a stack of the posture photos and then pinned the blame on the men. The administration looked pretty incompetent, unable to protect its students. And not long after, the entire posture program was shut down there.

[Dr. Beth Lenker]

The other thing that stops the posture photos is that this is the beginning of the disability rights movement. And people with severe disabilities successfully gaining access for the first time to the

[Carvana Spokesperson (Hank)]

handicapped demand that section 504 of the Civil Rights act be signed. It guarantees the rights of the handicapped in education and employment.

[Dr. Beth Lenker]

So you have a lot of post polio, people with polio who are wheelchair users, who fight against physical education mandates.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

Another major factor was the passage of FERPA in 1974, the Family Educational Rights and Protection Act. Students got sweeping new privacy protections, and suddenly universities had to rethink what kinds of records they kept and who had access to them.

[Dr. Beth Lenker]

All of these things come together to make it so that something like a practice of taking nude photographs of university students and keeping a record of these nude photographs seemed anathema to the spirit of the times.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

So schools quietly stopped the practice. No more nude photography. But they were still left with decades worth of the negative sitting in storage. And so began another quiet operation, disposal. Many schools began destroying the images.

[Dr. Beth Lenker]

And one reason for that was that a lot of colleges are not going to have the money to put these photographs in archival holdings. So they're not going to do that. The other thing is that they had a suspicion, especially with ferpa, that it wasn't going to look too good if these photographs got in the wrong hands.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

But it wasn't as simple as just getting rid of the photos. At some schools, like Smith College, there were years long debates. Archivists wanted to keep them arguing they could protect alumni's privacy by restricting access to the photos for a few decades. But university PR and legal counsel were adamant. Destroy the photos, and generally, they won. At all of these schools, the alumni, the people actually in the photos, weren't part of the conversations. Most of the alumni assumed the photos were long gone if they thought about them at all. Which is why a New York Times article set off such outrage. In 1995, reporter Ron Rosenbaum published a piece called the Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal. Rosenbaum knew the subject firsthand. He'd had his own poster photo taken as a freshman at Yale in the 1960s. What he revealed in the article was damning. First, those photos hadn't just been sitting in boxes all those years. Some of them had made their way to a highly controversial psychologist, William H. Sheldon.

[Dr. Beth Lenker]

Sheldon had interest in looking at external physical attributes, thinking that those certain physical attributes can tell you something about a person's inner thoughts, characteristics, and psychology.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

Sheldon developed a theory called somatotyping. It was basically a numbering system that sorted people into three body endomorphs, ectomorphs, and mesomorphs. Sheldon believed these body types told you just about everything about a person. Their intelligence, their character, their criminality. Someone who was linear or angular, for example, was considered more likely to be homosexual. Someone who was rounder was considered more likely to be lazy and undisciplined. To prove his theory, Sheldon needed photos. Lots of them.

[Jill Schlesinger]

Dr. Sheldon, can you explain why we have to have a somatotype photograph?

[Ivan Berger]

So we based the whole early work on somatotyping on the process of photographing many thousands of different growing boys and girls and college students.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

Sheldon was taking plenty of photos on his own, but he was also pursuing another source, the posture photographs that universities had been taking for years.

[Dr. Beth Lenker]

It didn't strike me that it was that difficult for him to get access to these photos. He just simply wrote letters to other professors on university campuses, and they would just send him the negatives or the prints.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

We don't know exactly how many images Sheldon got his hands on, but we do know this. His 1954 book, the Atlas of Men, includes no shortage of photos of Harvard freshmen. Then there was Rosenbaum's second bombshell. He discovered that, contrary to what alumni believed, many of these photos still existed. Yes, most universities had quietly destroyed their archives years ago, but thousands of images were still sitting in William Sheldon's personal collection, housed in the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian. Rosenbaum eventually got access to the boxes and Inside, he found perfectly preserved negatives of nude freshmen, some still labeled with ages, height, weight, names. Entire graduating classes were in there. Yale, class of 1950, 63, 64, 66, 71. Princeton, class of 1952. Penn, class of 1951. The list went on. When alumni found out about this, they were furious, and they didn't stay quiet.

[Dr. Beth Lenker]

Archivists were just inundated with irate alumni that these photos still existed. And so they were ordered by general counsel at their universities and administrators to travel to the Smithsonian to incinerate any eminence of photographs from their particular institution.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

Until this whole saga resurfaced, Richard hadn't given these photos any thought, let alone wondered where his might have ended up.

[Richard Senecal]

That would be kind of embarrassing to have out there, but maybe less so for me than some of my other compatriots. I mean, George W. Bush was a class ahead of me at Yale, and I'm sure went through the same thing as his dad probably did in the 40s. And talk about embarrassing. Think about posture pictures floating around for public figures. So I hope they were destroyed. That's all I can say. Although nowadays I might be glad to see how young and fit I was at that age.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

When I started working on this story, I figured it would be hard to find sources. Anyone who'd had their posture photo taken would likely be in their 80s or 90s by now, meaning they probably weren't online. So I submitted a letter to Yale's alumni magazine explaining what I was working on and asking anyone with memories of the posture photos to reach out. I expected one, maybe two responses, three at most. But over the next few weeks, dozens of messages came in from Yale graduates, many saying the same thing, that they hadn't thought about those posture photos in decades. But yes, of course, they remembered. One email stood out. It was from Ivan Berger. He was Yale, class of 1961.

[Ivan Berger]

I grew up in Naugatuck, Connecticut, about 20 miles from Yale. I went to, I think, a somewhat subpar grammar school, and it was obvious early in first grade that I was going to be the valedictorian.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

Ivan had the scores to get into Yale, but he worried about the price tag of tuition. In the end, he got a scholarship. It came with a condition, though. He'd have to work for the school.

[Ivan Berger]

Like my freshman year, I was a busboy in commons. Now commons was the freshman dining room. Being a busboy in commons is a bit like feeding the wolves.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

By sophomore year, Ivan was hoping to find a different job. And as luck would have it, There was a new job opening that involved one of his hobbies, photography.

[Ivan Berger]

In high school, I shot a hell of a lot of pictures and I also had my own darkroom and a very, very small business taking pictures from people.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

So Ivan signed up for the photography job, but it was not at all what he was expecting. He wouldn't be taking gearbook photos or snapping action shots of college athletes. He'd be taking nude posture photos of the incoming freshman.

[Ivan Berger]

We had to work it around my class schedule, so I would probably do an hour or two a day. It was just position the subject, click the button, four strobe lights go off at once. Next, it could be 100 in the day.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

Ivan's job didn't end once the photos were taken. He was also responsible for developing the prints. Hundreds of nude posture photos.

[Ivan Berger]

This is very, very boring if you are a straight guy. I suspect it would become boring after 10 minutes if you were the horniest straight girl in the east Coast. You know, it's one pudgy looking guy after another. God, did I know what making men look like.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

Ivan says he didn't just make a single set of prints, he made a second set too for WH Sheldon.

[Ivan Berger]

We were also sending a copy of each of the pictures to him and he would occasionally come in to check on things or whatever he was coming in for and I have no idea whatever became of that project.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

And did it ever seem strange to you that this doctor was getting access to the photos?

[Ivan Berger]

No, no, we weren't as privacy oriented back then because there weren't as many distributions available. I mean, in those days, if someone had gotten a hold of my posture picture, what the hell would they have done with it? Whereas now they could post it on Facebook.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

Ivan didn't think about the photos for decades. They didn't even come up when he and a friend were recently talking about the strangest jobs they'd ever had.

[Ivan Berger]

Only then I listed the odd ones. Erecting door frames, selling advertising and foreign technical publications and never thought of thinking of it shooting pictures of naked men. I could add that.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

If you've got a story idea, we would love to hear about it. Send us an [e-mail] and if you're loving this podcast, be sure to click follow on your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. While you're there. Leave us a A review and a five star rating. Campus Files is an Odyssey original podcast hosted by Margo Gray and Ian Mondt. Our executive producers are Leah Rhys Dennis and Lloyd Lockridge. Campus Files is produced by Ian Monkt and Margot Gray. Sound design and engineering by Andy Jaskowitz and Zach Clark. Legal support by Laura Berman and Melissa Jean. Original music by Davy Sumner. Special thanks to Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Hilary Schuff, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchison, Rose Sean Cherry, Kirk Courtney, and Lauren Vieira.

[Sarah Turney]

I'm Sarah Turney.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

And I'm Courtney Nicole.

[Sarah Turney]

We're the hosts of the Crime House original podcast. The Final Hours Crime has impacted both

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

of our families, teaching us how the last conversations, the missbred flags can change everything.

[Sarah Turney]

On the Final Hours, we examine the moments before a disappearance and the questions that never got answered. A podcast that puts the moments before a disappearance under a microscope.

[Narrator (Margo Gray)]

Listen to and follow the Final Hours available now. Wherever you get your podcasts.