Joel Orosz writes:

David Fanning writes: "I was reading an article on the Atlantic Monthly online about Yale's "Sex Week," when, oddly enough, the author started talking about William Sheldon.

[Sheldon is the author of "Early American Cents", the classic reference in the field. His photo project has been discussed previously in The E-Sylum (Volume 3, Number 47, November 12, 2000, among other references) -Editor]

Fanning goes on: "I knew about Sheldon's research, but I was interested in seeing how this person described it:

"...But nudity does figure in another remarkable Yale scandal, one in which I was both exposed and exposer, so to speak, which took place a few blocks north of Skull and Bones, at the Payne Whitney Gymnasium.

"This was 'The Great Ivy League Nude Posture-Photo Scandal.' Yale was not alone in being victimized by the posture-photo scandal: just about every Ivy League and Seven Sisters school from the 1930s to the 1960s was inveigled into allowing photos of nude or lingerie-clad freshmen to be taken and then transferred to the 'research archives' of a megalomaniac pseudo-scientist, W. H. Sheldon. Sheldon believed that the secret of all human character and fate could be reduced to a three-digit number derived from various 'postural relationships' (the photos were taken with metal pins affixed to the spine to define the arc of curvature). I was the reporter who discovered, in 1995, that all these nude photos of America's elite--tens of thousands of them, anyway--were available for viewing by 'qualified researchers' in an obscure archive of the Smithsonian Institution.

"I don't know if this can be classified as a sex scandal, exactly, but it demonstrates the tendency of a certain strain of academic to find a way to abstract from an actual body to a body of mathematical relationships--to pure number rather than impure flesh, if possible."

To read the complete original E-Sylum article, see:SHELDON'S PHOTO PROJECT(coinbooks.org/esylum_v06n08a04.html)