The
Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts
Yale willingly participated in eugenic schemes
to measure personal character, in particular the infamous practice that lasted
until 1968 of taking nude “posture” photographs to study the relation of body
type to personal abilities. Cohort after cohort of Yale men would walk from
their freshman dorms on old campus over to Payne-Whitney Gymnasium, stand in
line on the fourth floor, and enter one at a time into a room without windows.
Inside, two technicians would instruct youth to disrobe before they would place
metal pins against his spine that would both measure and hold each youth in
position while three photographs were taken. One need not imagine the
experience generated more, or less, anxiety than an army induction physical,
and the unpleasant registration procedure may have played some ritualistic role
for the youth demarcating, like a military haircut, the transition from
secondary school to Ivy League status. The practice, begun at a few elite colleges
in the 1930s, was required at all of the Ivy League colleges [Brown ,
Colombia , Cornell, Dartmouth , Harvard , Pennsylvania , Princeton, and Yale] and the Seven Sisters
[Barnard, Bryn, Mawr, Mount
Holyoke
At Harvard, the posture photographs were part
of a formal medical discourse on “character.” Every new Harvard undergraduate
would be photographed naked and then, on a separate occasion, subjected to a
medical exam by a member of the department of hygiene. The doctor would observe
and engage the freshman in a conversation about feelings, attitudes, and
activities. The doctor was supposed to use a diagnostic tool that presumed to
evaluate individuals against a normative standard of what constituted a healthy
masculine male. Harvard’s medical exam, regardless of intent, was a technology
that validated particular masculine cultural stereotypes, while stigmatizing
others as deviant.
Student’s had to arrive for the doctor’s
examination with a five-page questionnaire filled in, which included thinly
disguised ethnic inquiries, requesting that one list one’s religious
denomination, as well as one’s father’s and mother’s birthplace. Just as at
Yale, answers to those questions helped Harvard track its Jews. And there were
a number of questions on social class. One had to list the occupation of every
family member, and report incomes.
It was Naomi Wolf, author of
"The Beauty Myth," who opened the Pandora's box of posture-photo
controversy. In that book and in a 1992 Op-Ed piece in The Times, Wolf (Yale
'84) bitterly attacked Dick Cavett (Yale '55) for a joke he'd made at Wolf's
graduation ceremonies. According to Wolf, who'd never had a posture photo taken
(the practice was discontinued at Yale in 1968), Cavett took the microphone and
told the following anecdote:
“When I was an undergraduate, there
were no women at Yale. The women went to Vassar. At Vassar they had nude
photographs taken of women in gym class to check their posture. One year the
photos were stolen and turned up for sale in New Haven
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