Margo Gray

But it wasn't as simple as just getting rid of the photos.

At some schools, like Smith College, there were years-long debates.

Archivists wanted to keep them, arguing they could protect alumni's privacy by restricting access to the photos for a few decades.

But university PR and legal counsel were adamant, destroy the photos.

And generally, they won.

At all of these schools, the alumni, the people actually in the photos, weren't part of the conversations.

Most of the alumni assumed the photos were long gone, if they thought about them at all.

Which is why a New York Times article set off such outrage.

In 1995, reporter Ron Rosenbaum published a piece called The Great Ivy League Nude Poster Photo Scandal.

Rosenbaum knew the subject firsthand.

He'd had his own poster photo taken as a freshman at Yale in the 1960s.

What he revealed in the article was damning.

First, those photos hadn't just been sitting in boxes all those years.

Some of them had made their way to a highly controversial psychologist, William H. Sheldon.

Sheldon developed a theory called somatotyping.

It was basically a numbering system that sorted people into three body types, endomorphs, ectomorphs, and mesomorphs.

Sheldon believed these body types told you just about everything about a person.

Their intelligence, their character, their criminality.

Someone who was linear or angular, for example, was considered more likely to be homosexual.

Someone who was rounder was considered more likely to be lazy and undisciplined.