19. A Study That Backfired and Became an Ivy League Scandal
One day in the late 1970s, an employee of Yale University unlocked a room on campus that had not been used in many years. Inside, there was one helluva surprise: thousands of photos of nude young men, showing their fronts, sides, and rears. To add to the oddity, there seemed to be metal pins sticking out of the naked men’s spines. What could it be? Was it the trove of some weirdo, with a niche fetish for BDSM voodoo porn? It turned out to be nothing so juicy, but it was still weird. From the 1940s to the 1970s, Yale and other Ivy League schools such as Harvard, Vassar, and Brown, had required their freshmen to pose nude for a photoshoot.
The goal was to furnish material for a massive study into how rickets developed. That involved sticking pins to the backs of male and female subjects. Although the goal was laudable, the failure to consider and protect the students’ privacy backfired. Generations of elites who attended the Ivy Leagues had posed, and the archives included naked photos of well-known figures ranging from George W. Bush to Hillary Clinton to Diane Sawyer to Meryl Streep. The photos were burned after news leaked, and the study was denounced. However, it is possible that some might have escaped the flames, and are still circulating out there, to potentially end up on the internet someday.
