Margo Gray

In fact, the American Public Health Association formally recommended nude swimming as part of good pool management.

Two of the men stood off to the side, observing.

The third motioned for him to step onto a platform.

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.

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 weird.

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.

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?

From today's perspective, Richard's freshman orientation at Yale was, well, strange.