Ivy League Hazing

Between the late 1940s and early 1970s, several Ivy League schools (including Harvard and Yale) took mandatory nude photographs of all freshman students.

For decades, thousands of students at Harvard and other prestigious schools would arrive on campus, strip down, and pose in front of a camera with four-inch metal pins sticking out of their spines, essentially turning them into human porcupines.

The practice of taking “posture photos’’ was common back then.

While the general idea was that the photos were meant for the use of studying scoliosis and other posture-related deficiencies, it’s believed they were actually being used to research something rather more sinister. Strong evidence has shown that the research was actually using Ivy League freshmen students to study the correlation between a person’s body shape and their intelligence. The Nazis compiled similar archives analyzing photos of body types to support their theories on race and social hierarchy.

Thousands of pictures were taken, including such notable names as George Bush, Diane Sawyer, Meryl Streep and Hillary Rodham Clinton.