Margo Gray

They were told that they had posture problems and needed to take remedial classes.

So for countless American college students, these posture classes became something of a rite of passage.

But the whole practice was living on borrowed time.

By the end of the 1960s, poster photographs were on their way out.

In fact, by the time Richard graduated from Yale in 1969, freshmen were no longer subjected to these photographs.

So what happened?

Dr. Linker says that there wasn't a single moment that ended it.

Instead, a handful of forces quietly converged.

One of them was the feminist movement.

At Cornell University, a group of female students staged a quiet rebellion.

They stole a stack of the posture photos and then pinned the blame on the men.

The administration looked pretty incompetent, unable to protect its students.

And not long after, the entire posture program was shut down there.

Another major factor was the passage of FERPA in 1974, the Family Educational Rights and Protection Act.

Students got sweeping new privacy protections, and suddenly universities had to rethink what kinds of records they kept and who had access to them.

So schools quietly stopped the practice.

No more nude photography.

But they were still left with decades worth of the negative sitting in storage.

And so began another quiet operation, disposal.

Many schools began destroying the images.