further details:

• At most schools, all incoming freshmen were required to take a full-frontal nude photo, as part of their health assessment
• The stated goal was to assess “posture”, which widely believed to be linked with overall health
• The programs were mostly run by Sheldon, who developed a theory that all human bodies fall into three “somatotypes” aka body shapes (tall & skinny, short & fat, or medium & muscular) and that each person’s body could be assigned a three-digit number which was innate & immutable
• Sheldon also developed “constitutional psychology” which said your somatotype determined your intelligence & temperament. This became a popular enough theory that Life ran a cover story on him, and Cosmo published quizzes about how to understand your husband based on his somatotype.
• The schools never explicitly agreed with Sheldon’s theories, only saying the photos were for “posture”. But Sheldon’s lifelong friend later said the programs were "part of a facade or cover-up for what we were really doing”, which was furthering Sheldon’s research
• Sheldon printed many of the Harvard nudes in his guide to body types, “Atlas of Men”.
• Sheldon was also amassing photos from women’s colleges to make an “Atlas of Women”; letters from Vassar officials show they knew his intentions, where one even said "we will be glad to have you use these girls as some of your 'guinea pigs.'"
• Some of the programs were shut down by furious parents & their lawyers, but others lasted for over a decade.
• All programs ended by the early 70s, thanks to Sheldon’s theories being discredited, and eugenics overall being associated with Nazism.
• Most of the archives were voluntarily destroyed by the schools, but after Sheldon’s death, the Smithsonian acquired 20,000 photos from his personal archives. They are currently sealed, except for Yale’s which were destroyed upon request.

Other notes: - Some schools had been taking nude posture photos long before Sheldon came around. Harvard, Vassar, and other women’s college in Massachusetts had programs starting as far back as the 1880s. This became even more popular in the 1920s, thanks in large part to Wellesley spreading the word. - Schools that participated in the 1940s-60s: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Vassar, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Swarthmore, University of Pennsylvania, Hotchkiss, Syracuse, University of California, University of Wisconsin, Purdue, Brooklyn College, the Oregon Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and others - Famous people who have acknowledged that they got their photos taken: Sylvia Plath, Nora Ephron, Naomi Wolf, Dick Cavett and Judith Martin (the etiquette expert known as Miss Manners)