MemeMachineGo!

The children of privilege subjected to twisted eugenic experimentation! Nude photos of Hilary Clinton. And George Bush. And Miss Manners. The Strange Case of the Ivy League Posture Photos has got everything but Elvis!

One afternoon in the late 1970’s, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and stumbled upon something shocking and disturbing.

Shocking, because what he found was an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side and rear poses. Disturbing, because on closer inspection the photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual: sticking out from the spine of each and every body was a row of sharp metal pins.

It seems it was standard practice for decades at several Ivy League schools to photograph incoming freshmen in the nude as part of student orientation. Miss Manners comments on it (while pointing out Mona Lisa Smile’s shortcomings.)

There are censored photos here and here, and uncensored negatives in an article in this magazine (pdf.)

All links are from this Metafilter thread where there are links to even more articles on the subject.