Why Ivy League Schools Used To Require Nude Photos Of Students

Yale art history professor George Hersey said that the photos were actually part of an anthropological study that "had nothing to do with posture ... that is only what we were told." The — for lack of a better word — "brains" behind the operation was a man named W. H. Sheldon, a psychologist from Columbia University who was trying to find correlations between people's body types and their personalities and temperaments. Sheldon developed the theory of "somatotypes," different body types that could explain a person's mannerisms, behaviors, habits, and other pop-psych mumbo jumbo. The words he created to explain these types — ectomorphic, mesomorphic, and endomorphic — are still used to this day, but only to describe general body shapes. His theories linking these physical types to psychological ones have been largely debunked.

While it may be tempting and facile to believe that certain people behave certain ways, Yale graduate Ron Rosenbaum related what Sheldon was doing to the Nazis, who "compiled similar archives analyzing the photos for racial as well as characterological content." The photos apparently had no pornographic value and were used strictly for a "resolutely scientific nature," which in a way is actually creepier, if you ask us. The project ended up sounding too much like that other now-disproved pseudoscience eugenics, and by the end of his life, Sheldon's theories and studies were no longer accepted by the upper echelons of U.S. academia that had previously espoused them.

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