Despite the admission office’s recent attempts to make the University of Chicago more welcoming to the well-adjusted and increasingly selective, UChicago is still where fun comes to die. There are students who wouldn’t have it any other way, and others who hate every minute of it. Both groups, at some point or another, end up in the Regenstein Library, where the school motto (Crescat scientia, vita excolatur, ‘May knowledge grow from more to more and so be human life enriched’) is emblazoned near the entrance. The U.S. News & World Report states that the 6-year graduation rate is 91%, and their students’ incoming SAT scores, 25th-75th percentile, are 1370-1560.

This project started when I began documenting the graffiti in the stacks of the Regenstein Library in fall 2007. For two years, the only graffiti I cared about was what I found in “the Reg”, and that shaped my expectations about what university graffiti should look like. Unfortunately, I subsequently discovered that the UChicago corpus really is unique, leading to disappointment whenever I’ve sought out graffiti elsewhere. To put it in terms of an “interestingness” score, UChicago’s unweighted score is 1.8, with a weighted score of 1.85. To be fair, this includes data from bathrooms– including the B-level (sub-basement) men’s bathroom, possibly the nerdiest place on earth. None of the other corpora include bathroom data, though I suspect this only helps their score, because bathrooms often drag interestingness scores down. If you exclude the bathrooms, the unweighted score is still 1.74, and the weighted score is 1.79– still .2 higher than the next-highest score, from Brown.

Most interesting categories

This ranking includes the graffiti from the bathrooms. Almost all the B-level men’s bathroom graffiti is a reference; the interestingness score for references, excluding the material from the bathroom, is 2.1

Most common categories

Without the examples from the bathrooms, references make up 5.1% of the corpus.

Quotes and references

When I was only looking at UChicago graffiti, I undervalued graffiti quoting other sources, dismissing them as “typical”. But looking across corpora from different universities, quotes don’t seem to be typical at all– only Brown and UChicago have a high number of quotes; the other three schools rely more heavily on references. Where Brown has about twice as many quotes as references, at UChicago they’re about equal, if you include the B-level men’s bathroom. If you exclude that data, the pattern is more like Brown: about twice as many quotes as references.

The references to “intellectuals” are almost all from the B-level men’s bathroom. There are 20 examples of references to music, broken down into the following genres:

The “other” genres here are R&B, classical, country, hip-hop, reggae, metal, and funk. As for the sources of quotes:

“Scholarship” includes quotes from such works as “Sister Outside: Essays and Speeches” by Audre Lorde, “Science and the Modern World” by Alfred North Whitehead, and Nursing World, vol. 23-24 (1899). The last of these may just be a coincidence; the piece of graffiti in question reads “Nurse, pass the bread.” On the other hand, there might be a really great story behind it. Similar to Brown, about half the quotes are from songs, a total of 76 pieces in the following genres:

Again similar to Brown, rock of various flavors makes up about half the music quotes. At Brown indie is the major sub-category of rock, whereas at UChicago, alternative and punk rock are the largest sub-categories. Beyond that detail, the similarities are striking: rap, pop, punk, and folk are all about equally represented at Brown and UChicago.

Love vs. hate

The UChicago corpus is unique in how many things are hated, and how many things people have mixed feelings about. Like Arizona State, people both love and hate their school, but UChicago students are also conflicted about themselves and “it”. Nine people are loved by name, including Milton Friedman, and “you” appears as the object of love four times. There are fewer sexually-tinged objects of affection than in the Brown corpus, and more references to food. Gen chem is loved but chemistry and biochem are hated. Again conflictingly, both “graffiti” and “when they erase the graffiti” are hated.

Homophobia

I’ve previously written an in-depth examination of homophobia at UChicago, but to provide the most recent data in a form ready for easy comparison with the other corpora, there are 16 pieces of homophobic graffiti (1.1%), when counting each word only once if they’re used multiple times in a single piece. The UChicago corpus uses a greater variety of words than any of the other corpora:

Sexual vs. non-sexual

All in all, UChicago’s sexual word use is fairly middle-of-the-road. In regards to the word “fuck” (with 57 attestations), UChicago uses it more sexually than Brown (14% vs. 9%), but less so than Arizona State (20%) or University of Colorado (24%). For “suck”, UChicago largely aligns with Arizona State with 25% sexual usage– well more than Colorado (12%) and well less than Brown (45%). UChicago, like Brown, has a relatively large number of attestations of “ass” compared to Arizona State and Colorado, but “ass” is only used sexually 27% of the time, compared to Brown’s 53%.

Interestingness by location

Since I had location metadata for the UChicago graffiti, I decided to look at whether any locale had particularly interesting material. The B-level men’s room blew away all the other locations, with an average score of 2.64. Other than that, the other locations (A-level whiteboard, study carrels, walls in the stacks, study desks in the stacks, and other bathrooms) were more or less equal, with the study desks showing slightly lower scores.

Categories over time

One of the most popular metrics in my pseudo-scientific graffiti analysis was the time-based data. In the limited data set I examined, there were some very interesting correlations, where love and despair tended to pattern together, whereas sex reached its one peak in December and declined for the rest of the year. I can’t even recall how exactly I assigned things to “love”, “despair” or “sex” to create that graph, but I re-did it over a longer timespan (fall ’07 – fall ’10, rather than just the 2007-2008 school year), and using the same categorization I used for the rest of the analysis. I didn’t document any graffiti during winter 2009, although there wasn’t much graffiti to document as the walls had recently been painted over.

Sadly, the data is quite scattered, without any clear patterns falling out of it. Category-frequency-over-time analyses, I fear, may be a non-starter.

Interestingness over time / interestingness vs. sample size

Feeling nostalgic for classic pieces of graffiti like “I’m in love and it’s finals week”, I started this analysis convinced that the UChicago graffiti corpus was getting less interesting. However, when I looked at the data, I discovered that it wasn’t the case at all. If anything, the score has been more consistently high over the last school year. Note that the unweighted score is being used here:

One methodological note: there’s 106 pieces of graffiti from the study carrels that were written in either fall 2009 or winter 2010. I took the average of those 106 pieces, and added 53 pieces of graffiti with an average interestingness of 1.58 to the data for each quarter.

Between fall 2007 and fall 2010, the corpus of new graffiti each quarter has fluctuated wildly:

I calculated the Pearson coefficient for interestingness and corpus size, and the result was -.11 — indicating that there is no correlation between the size of the corpus for a given quarter, and how interesting it is. This fact leads me to not be too concerned about differences in sample size between the different university corpora, with the caveat that a minimum threshold (approximately 250 pieces) is met.

See for yourself

The spreadsheets I used to compile the data are available as a Google Doc. If you want to download the data for yourself, just go to File > Download and choose your favorite format. If you do something interesting with the data, I’d love to hear about it (quinn – at – crescatgraffiti – dot – com). There’s no single photo set for the UChicago graffiti on Flickr, but anything in the Crescat Graffiti collection that isn’t labeled with the name of another university or library is from the Reg.

In conclusion

I calculated the standard deviation for the quarter-by-quarter interestingness scores at UofC, with a result of 0.105. The overall unweighted score for Brown, at 1.56, is about 2.5 standard deviations below the UofC average. As far as I’ve seen, the graffiti in the Regenstein Library has no peer.

Happy New Year, everyone.

The only Ivy League school I’ve had the chance to explore, Brown University has a library full of wood study desks in the bookstacks, palimpsests of text that has accumulated over many years. In only a few hours there, I amassed 931 pieces of graffiti, 64% of the total amount of graffiti I’ve gathered over the span of three years at UChicago. The U.S. News & World Report* states that their 6-year graduation rate is 95%, and their students’ incoming SAT scores, 25th-75th percentile, are 1320-1530.

Going to Brown University revitalized my love for the graffiti project; I had been getting discouraged after looking at one uninspiring graffiti corpus after another. I think a fair cutoff for what I consider to be a “satisfying” graffiti corpus is 1.5, and Brown makes that cut with an unweighted interestingness score of 1.56 and a weighted score of 1.59.

Most interesting categories

Most common categories

Quotes and references

Brown University and UChicago are the only two schools that have a significant number of graffiti quoting sources directly, rather than just making reference to them. At Brown, there’s more than twice as many quotes as references (34 references vs. 72 quotes). There’s enough quotes from music for an exploration of genre to be worthwhile.

The “other” sources include video games, sports, and internet memes.

As usual, music is by far the most common source of quotes, and it can be divided by genre as follows:

Brown students quote music from a wider variety of genres than other schools (over 10 genres quoted, vs. references from 5 genres for Colorado and 4 genres for Arizona State), though this is almost certainly influenced by the larger corpus size. Still, rock (collectively) is more common at Brown than elsewhere: 48%, compared to 23% at Colorado and 33% at Arizona State.

Love vs. hate

There’s a lot of love, and not much hate at Brown. 13 names appear as the objects of affection, and “you” appears six times for love and three times for hate. There’s a wide variety of sexually-tinged objects of affection, from “hot wet pussy” to “hot eunuchs” to “girlfriend’s vagina”. In a corpus this large, it’s remarkable how few things Brown students hate.

Homophobia

There are seven clear examples of homophobia in the Brown corpus, and two ambiguous examples (“VJB likes men” and “Why are there so many homosexuals at Brown?”), the latter of which has the response “Stop homophobia.” 0.76% – 0.97% of the graffiti show homophobia, depending on how you count the ambiguous data. “Fag[got] is used twice as often as “gay”, and the corpus also includes the term “butt-chugger”.

Sexual vs. non-sexual

Given how sexual the Brown graffiti corpus is overall (10% of the graffiti was categorized as “sex”, the most common category), one might expect more sexual use of “fuck”, “suck” and “ass” than in the other corpora. That’s definitely the case for “suck” and “ass”: “suck” is used sexually 45% of the time, vs. 27% at ASU and 12% at the University of Colorado. “Ass” appears twice (vaguely) sexually at ASU and five times non-sexually at University of Colorado, but the 15 examples of “ass” at Brown are split about evenly between sexual and non-sexual uses. Perhaps most interesting, though, is the use of the word “fuck” at Brown. It’s used sexually 20% of the time at ASU, and 24% of the time at the University of Colorado, but less than 10% of the time at Brown.

See for yourself

The spreadsheets I used to compile the data are available as a Google Doc. If you want to download the data for yourself, just go to File > Download and choose your favorite format. If you do something interesting with the data, I’d love to hear about it (quinn – at – crescatgraffiti – dot – com). You can also browse the photo set on Flickr.

Next up

To finish out the year, the last part of the analysis will focus on the University of Chicago, where this whole project began. In addition to the usual metrics, the UChicago analysis includes a second-look at the time-based analysis that was part of the original pseudo-scientific analysis.

* I hate the US News & World Report rankings, particularly the way the admissions office at UChicago has been eager to bend over backwards to improve their score, to the detriment of the school’s unique “personality”. But in case you’re curious, Brown University is ranked at #15.

The University of California at Berkeley was my first stop when I expanded my study of graffiti to other universities. After the University of Chicago’s graffiti, I was struck by the violence, discussions of identity, and vaginas I found there.

According to the US News & World Report*, their 6-year graduation rate is 90% and their students’ incoming SAT scores, 25th-75th percentile, are 950-1210.

There’s only 143 pieces of graffiti in the Berkeley corpus, and this is problematic. A couple discussions on a given topic can skew the “most common categories”. If there’s only a couple pieces of graffiti in a given category, and they have a high score, it skews the “most interesting categories”. There’s only three quotes and four references, so looking at their source or music genre isn’t very informative.

The unweighted interestingness score for Berkeley is 1.43, and the weighted score is 1.47. In spite of the corpus size issues, the interestingness score might be one of the more valid results. I’ve looked at the interestingness score for the UChicago graffiti corpus quarter-by-quarter, and the score doesn’t vary much between quarters, even when the sample size for that particular quarter is the same size as the Berkeley corpus or smaller.

Most interesting categories

The “most interesting categories” data is skewed by the size of the corpus. I’ve included the number of pieces in each category; the top two categories are most affected by the small corpus.

Most common categories

Berkeley students apparently have a lot of advice to share.

Quotes and references

There’s only three quotes (from a pop song, a rock song, and the Bible) and four references (to a punk song, a gang, and two references to sports).

Love vs. hate

There are four things that are loved, and one thing that is hated in the Berkeley corpus; it’s so small that I don’t think it can be trusted to be representative. But, for whatever little it’s worth…

Homophobia

There are three homophobic pieces of graffiti in the Berkeley corpus (2% of the total graffiti). All of them are variations on fag[got]: “fag”, “Asians are fags”, and “cheat more faggot”.

Sexual vs. non-sexual

Once again, the corpus size causes problems. There are three instances of “fuck” — two of them are non-sexual, one of them (“fuck girls”) is ambiguous. There are two examples of “suck”, both non-sexual. There are no examples of “ass”.

See for yourself

The spreadsheets I used to compile the data are available as a Google Doc. If you want to download the data for yourself, just go to File > Download and choose your favorite format. If you do something interesting with the data, I’d love to hear about it (quinn – at – crescatgraffiti – dot – com). You can also browse the photo set on Flickr.

Next up

Part 4 in the series of graffiti analysis results is Brown University. Corpus size isn’t a problem there– in only a couple hours at Brown University’s Rockefeller Library, I amassed 931 pieces of graffiti, 64% of the amount of graffiti I’ve gathered over the span of three years at UChicago.

* I hate the US News & World Report rankings, particularly the way the admissions office at UChicago has been eager to bend over backwards to improve their score, to the detriment of the school’s unique “personality”. But in case you’re curious, University of California at Berkeley is ranked at #22.

An endearing hippie-town in the mountains with outstanding microbreweries, Boulder is home to the University of Colorado – Boulder. The U.S. News & World Report* states that their 6-year graduation rate is 67.0%, and their students’ incoming ACT scores, 25th-75th percentile, are 24-29 (roughly equivalent to 1110-1300 on the SAT).

Unlike the other corpora I’ve looked at for this analysis, this is the first time I’ve written about the University of Colorado on the blog. The trip to their library was neither overwhelmingly inspiring, nor overwhelmingly bad, and that’s reflected in their interestingness score: 1.38 unweighted, and 1.41 weighted.

Most interesting categories

Like with the Arizona State graffiti, it’s worth noting that reference and quotes are the easiest categories for getting higher scores: quoting/referencing song lyrics gets you a 1, TV/movies/pop lit gets you a 2, and literature/theater gets you a 3. Greek is also easy to score high in: just say something about the frat will get you a 2 or 3, whereas just writing its name will get you a 1.

Most common categories

Quotes and references

Quoting sources directly, instead of only making references to them, is a trend found in the corpora from UChicago and Brown. The University of Colorado has about twice as many references as quotes (26 vs. 14), but the disparity is significantly less than at ASU, where it was an 8-to-1 ratio.

As expected, music is the biggest source of references. The genres are broken down as follows:

The distribution of sources for quotes is similar:

The “intellectuals” quoted at the University of Colorado are Heinrich Kaminski and Nietzsche, in case you’re curious. There are only four quotes from songs– three of them rock songs, one of them Latin.

Love vs. hate

There are six stated objects of love, and four statements of hate in the University of Colorado corpus. (There’s three additional objects of love– “hippies”, “sluts” and “douchebags”, but the context is obviously sarcastic.) Unlike at Arizona State, Colorado has a couple statements about love and hate: “If all of you turned your hate into passion to LOVE, Boulder would be a better place…” and “Hate no one and nothing “.

Homophobia

8 pieces of graffiti at the University of Colorado (3% of the total) make negative use of “gay” or “fag[g]ot”. (Yes, someone misspelled it.) While the percent of homophobic graffiti isn’t much less than Arizona State’s 4.2%, “gay” is used much more frequently in the University of Colorado corpus:

Sexual vs. non-sexual

The final metric I looked at was sexual vs. non-sexual use of words that could have either reading. Out of 25 examples of “fuck”, 19 were non-sexual. There were 8 examples of “suck”, with 7 of them non-sexual. Interestingly, three of the non-sexual examples take the usually sexual form “suck dick” (“Obama sucks dick”, “Lakers suck dick”, “UTAH Jazz suck 10 million dicks”), but it’s being used for emphasis rather than as a reference to oral sex. All five examples of “ass” are non-sexual.

See for yourself

The spreadsheets I used to compile the data are available as a Google Doc. If you want to download the data for yourself, just go to File > Download and choose your favorite format. If you do something interesting with the data, I’d love to hear about it (quinn – at – crescatgraffiti – dot – com). You can also browse the photo set on Flickr.

Next up

Part 3 in the series of graffiti analysis results is the University of California at Berkeley. There’s a problem with the results: I’m skeptical about the validity of some of them, because I suspect the sample size is too small. I’ve done the work, though, so I’ll present the results… with a lot of disclaimers and warnings.

* I hate the US News & World Report rankings, particularly the way the admissions office at UChicago has been eager to bend over backwards to improve their score, to the detriment of the school’s unique “personality”. But in case you’re curious, University of Colorado – Boulder is ranked at #86.

Located in a college town that seems to have neither a coffee house nor a bookstore (and I don’t mean stores that sell textbooks along with school paraphernalia), Arizona State University is a rather bizarre place. The U.S. News & World Report* states their 6-year graduation rate is 56%, and their students’ incoming SAT scores, 25th-75th percentile, are 950 – 1210.

My visit to their library last summer was the most depressing graffiti trip I’ve made.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Arizona State didn’t fare too well on interestingness, with an unweighted score of 1.23 and a weighted score of 1.25.

Most interesting categories

It’s worth noting that reference and quotes are the easiest categories for getting higher scores: quoting/referencing song lyrics gets you a 1, TV/movies/pop lit gets you a 2, and literature/theater gets you a 3.

Most common categories

Quotes and references

Based on my long-term exposure to the University of Chicago graffiti corpus, I went into the analysis looking down on the practice of quoting sources directly, given how common it is at UChicago. Remarkably, when looking across all five corpora, it seems that quoting sources is a phenomenon found mostly at the better schools (UChicago and Brown), whereas making references– without quoting– is more common at less good schools. Arizona State is the clearest example: there are over 8 references for every quote. At UChicago, the numbers are about equal; at Brown, there’s about 2 quotes for every reference.

Given how few quotes there are at ASU (a grand total of 5, and only 2 are song lyrics), looking at music genres is uninteresting. For the record, both quotes are from rap songs. The 41 references point to a variety of sources:

Here’s the genre breakdown for the 9 references to bands and/or songs:

Love vs. hate

There is far more love (25 pieces) than hate (3 pieces) at Arizona State, with names referenced as objects of affection 10 times, and school mentioned twice for love, and once for hate.

Homophobia

Arizona State has the most homophobic corpus, with 4.2% of the graffiti (22 pieces) making some reference to “gay” or “fag[got]“, not in a positive light. Both words are used equally often:

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Sexual vs. non-sexual

The final metric I looked at was sexual vs. non-sexual use of words that could have either reading, e.g. “fuck me” (sexual) vs. “fuck finals” (non-sexual); “suck my cock” vs. “this sucks”; “fuck me in the ass” vs. “what an asshole”. Out of 25 examples of “fuck”, and 11 examples of “suck”, non-sexual uses were more common. There were only two examples of “ass” (“fat ass” and “hot asses”).

See for yourself

The spreadsheets I used to compile the data are available as a Google Doc. If you want to download the data for yourself, just go to File > Download and choose your favorite format. If you do something interesting with the data, I’d love to hear about it (quinn – at – crescatgraffiti – dot – com). You can also browse the photo set on Flickr.

Next up

Part 2 in the series of graffiti analysis results is University of Colorado — Boulder. It’s a significant step up from Arizona State.

* I hate the US News & World Report rankings, particularly the way the admissions office at UChicago has been eager to bend over backwards to improve their score, to the detriment of the school’s unique “personality”. But in case you’re curious, ASU is ranked at #143.

ASU library graffiti has three unique and striking features:

1. The number of messages consisting primarily or exclusively of frat names
2. The high frequency with which gay and fag are used as insults
3. The amount of scratches — not drawings, but animalistic scratches on the desks

Frat names

I was astonished at the prevalence of the genre of graffiti consisting of one or more sets of frat names– without any context, or at best, with an associated negative judgment, often phrased in homophobic manner. The dark wood study desks on the upper levels of the library are covered in this kind of graffiti, and I quickly grew tired of photographing it. Taken collectively, frat names would be by far the most frequently used “word” in the entire graffiti corpus. There’s nothing unique about frat names (even, much to my chagrin, at the University of Chicago), nor the combination of frat names and homophobia (even, again, at the University of Chicago), but the extent to which it appears to be the dominant form of “discourse” at Arizona State is stunning.

Homophobia

Consider for a moment, if you will, the top five words from the corpus:

1. love(s) – 34
2. fuck(s/er/a/in/ing, etc.) – 27
3. gay(s) – 12
4. fag(s/gots, etc.) – 12
5. like(s) – 11

I think that pretty much says it all.

It would’ve been interesting to explore the men’s bathrooms at ASU, to look for private examples of racism, antisemitism, and misogyny to contrast with public homophobia like at the University of Chicago. Alas, skulking around men’s bathrooms at my home institution is one thing, and doing so at other universities is entirely another.

Scratchings

ASU is not lacking in drawings of genitalia, but the phenomenon of assorted scratches is not one I’ve seen elsewhere. Perhaps it is on account of these seemingly-feral students roaming the building that those interested in pursuing serious study are caged. No joke. The equivalent to the private study carrel found at other universities is a small caged room that could pass as an inmate’s cell.

Attack of the space felines

One day while spending two months at ASU, my husband came across this graffiti narrative in a classroom. “Literate” might be slightly overstating the case, but it does have a certain spark of creativity, doesn’t involve any frat names or homophobia, and I think it makes for the least depressing conclusion to this post:

To many puppies Are Being Shot in The dark

That’s because the horses can’t buy anymore ammo for the farmers.

Else, the puppies simply could not afford to pay the new taff tariffs on electricity imposed by the draconian rule of the Cilk, space-felines from a distant galaxy. After the Clik snuffed out our sun, the genocidal execution of the puppy-dogs had to take place in the dark. For you see, the Clik simply hate candles.

In just three hours combing through the study areas in the Rock stacks, I collected over 500 pieces of graffiti– a number that took me about six months in the corresponding areas of the Reg. What’s the difference? Even though the Rock and the Reg have similar setups, (wood study desks and adjacent white walls) students at Brown tend to write on the desks, where at UChicago the majority of the graffiti appears on the walls, which are much easier to clean periodically. The result: desk-as-palimpsest, with some graffiti in areas of the desk that are less likely to be worn down by other people’s books and papers apparently persisting for 15+ years.

This is the first time I’ve been able to collect such a sizable corpus at any university besides UChicago, and Brown being an Ivy League school makes for a fairer comparison² than, say, UChicago vs. Arizona State. If you want to explore the corpus yourself, here’s the photo set³ and the transcription of the English graffiti.

The spaces

There a lot more desks at Brown than UChicago– on most floors, they’re lined up in rows. Like at Berkeley and Mount Holyoke, it appears that at least some of the desks are reserved for individuals. Unlike Mount Holyoke, few of the desks are decorated, and I found only one note threatening anyone who might encroach on the space. (Don’t mess with Masumi’s desk. She’ll eat you.)

Similarities?

As I was walking through the library, madly snapping pictures (I maxed out my 4 GB memory card in the first hour and a half), a number of whimsical gems stuck in my mind. Recent UChicago graffiti additions haven’t been doing much for me lately; when I think of the corpus, the banal leaps to mind first. The novelty of the Brown graffiti made it seem fascinating and profound by comparison. The discovery of a hieroglyphic play on words seemed like a particularly striking similarity to the UChicago corpus.

But looking at word frequencies across a transcribed data set provides a more dispassionate view onto the data. Upon greater reflection, it seems like there are more differences than similarities between the sets of graffiti. The picture that emerges is of UChicago as a school of (at times gleefully) unhappy, critical students eager to one-up each other in intellectual (or less-intellectual) debates, whereas Brown leads more towards the hedonistic and happier, expressing their sexuality.

Perhaps the one thing students at both schools share is a dislike of organic chemistry.

Organic chemistry

In the Reg, students languish under the cruel hand of “o-chem“. In the Rock, it’s “orgo” that strikes fear into the hearts of students. And, as at UChicago, there’s always some masochist who enjoys it.

Insecurity

Despair is a theme so common in UChicago graffiti that it has its own photo set with over 70 photos. Students worry they aren’t smart enough, and are drowning and doomed. In the Brown graffiti corpus, one student wondered why they were accepted to Brown, and another student needs to be smarter, though those are the only examples of such sentiments.

At Brown, students seem pretty happy with the school; someone even wrote it a goodbye note. There’s no meme of “be happy” (suggesting happiness is an unrealized state) like at UChicago, and while there was one conversation about depression, it was by no means a pervasive topic.

Given that smiley and frowny faces often serve as a form of punctuation rather than being a meaningful indicator of overall state of being, I hesitate to bring it up in this context. For what little it may be worth, though, where UChicago has almost a 2:1 ratio of smiley to frowny faces, the ratio is 5:1 at Brown.

Homophobia

I’ve written about anti-LGBTQ graffiti at UChicago before, and Brown provides an interesting point of comparison and contrast. There are 8 examples in the public Brown study areas, compared to 12 in the corresponding spaces at UChicago; that’s about even, since the UChicago corpus has about twice as many words.

At UChicago, there’s greater variety in the words used (fag, flamer, gay, homo, homosexual, lesbo); at Brown, there’s only “gay”, “fag[got]” and “homosexual”. There’s one use of “lesbian” Furthermore, while “fag” was used less than “gay” at UChicago, it outnumbers “gay” in the Brown corpus.

Brown and UChicago sport nearly identical pieces of graffiti, where anti-LGBTQ language is used as a counter-response to someone responding to the word “retarded”; at UChicago, it’s “gay“; at Brown, it’s “faggot“. At Brown, Backgammon is for fags only, a “good fag suck” finds its way into some bad collective poetry, and “faggot” is used as a generic insult.

However, three of the eight pieces were subsequently censured by other students. “Why are there so many homosexuals at brown? is followed up by “Stop homophobia”. “Butt-chugger – GAY” has the incredulous reply “Really? In here!?”. And “NO GAYS” is rejected by a number of individuals: “U R Sick”, “no hatred”, “No ignorance”.

There’s a couple other pieces of graffiti at Brown that refer to LGBTQ individuals differently from those pieces mentioned above. A response to one piece about “hot chicks” asks “Are you lesbian?” without any apparent pejorative implication. A follow-up to a piece of graffiti about the directionality of penis bending states “Queers Bash Back“; if there was any initial anti-LGBTQ bashing, though, it’s been worn off the desk. Finally, one piece illustrates reproduction vs. pleasure, where pleasure is initially defined as ⚢ ⚣. Although a reply disagrees, there’s no homophobia in the response.

Sex

The topic of sex is perhaps the most significant point of divergence between UChicago and Brown. On one hand, UChicago has more penis drawings, even when accounting for the different corpus size. On the other hand, it seems like Brown has more of everything else.

Chicago has 43 sexually-focused words out of 9209– .4%. Brown has 70 such words out of 5352– 1.3%. For a comparison, see the following chart. Please keep in mind that the Brown corpus is about half the size of the UChicago corpus:

(% is percentage of the total uses of the word that are sexual, for those words that also have a non-sexual meaning. “Penis” and “Vagina” also include uses of “dick, cock, dong” and “pussy, cunt”, respectively.)

As you can see above, UChicago and Brown have a comparable amount of fucking (slightly more sexually at UChicago), but there is a great deal more sexual sucking at Brown. In fact, almost half the sucking at Brown is sexual, whereas both “fuck” and “suck” are used sexually only 16% of the time at UChicago.

UChicago has more penis references, even when taking the relative corpora sizes into consideration, but vaginas are referenced about 8x more often at Brown than UChicago.

The gems

Perhaps I’ve been a bit hard on Brown graffiti in this blog post. The fact is, walking into a study area covered in graffiti gave me a taste of the thrill I first felt when I started taking pictures in the Regenstein Library. It gave this project a much-needed jolt of life and made me want to write a blog post for the first time in over a month.

My favorite pieces of graffiti tend to be ones that don’t fit well under any header in a blog post highlighting the major trends at a given school. There’s ellipsis turning into bubbles from the mouth of a hungry fish. There’s Go Go Gadget Shroud of Turin, which feels like it should be an item in UChicago’s famous Scav Hunt. There’s “I used to believe but now I’m incredible“. There’s a quote from W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One“. But I’d like to close with an adapted quote from Rumi:

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are so many ways.

¹ This seems like a trivial point, but it’s not a given. Just wait until I write about Arizona State University’s graffiti.

² UChicago folks may be quick to mention that Brown is the lowest-ranked of the Ivies (#16 in the current rankings– compared to UChicago at #8). A good case can be made that rankings say very little, and UChicago was a more interesting and quirky place before the administration started making the changes that improved our ranking. There’s probably something to the idea that Brown’s image doesn’t include the intellectual firepower of UChicago; nonetheless, I think it’s hard to argue that it’s not a peer institution, all UChicago elitism aside.

³ There’s a fair amount of French, German and Greek graffiti, if anyone wants to help out with the translation. Just comment on the Flickr photo or e-mail me.

What you don’t find in the bathrooms is a disproportionate amount of homophobia. Why make a special trip to the bathroom when you can freely insult LGBTQ students wherever you would normally write graffiti?

Looking through my graffiti corpus*, there are 14¹ unique pieces that either use anti-LGBTQ language or single out LGBTQ students (see the photo set). Out of about 1700 photos, that seems to be a trivial number. And in a sense, it is– from hieroglyphic sex graffiti to philosopher-name wordplay, fun over time and chemistry, University of Chicago students mostly write about other things.

Those 14 pieces, though, appear less trivial when compared with the graffiti directed towards other groups. Graffiti expressing racism (1)², antisemitism (4), and misogyny (4)³ combined total up to 9 pieces. (See the photo set.) Of those, the racist graffiti and three of the four antisemitic pieces are located in men’s bathrooms. In contrast, only two of the 14 LGBTQ-related pieces (14%) are in the bathroom– the rest are in public places.

Remarkably, graffiti that can be read as relating to LGBTQ students seems to be more likely to attract remarks in public than in the bathrooms. There are no comments next to the m4m ads in the bathroom, but juxtapose two names of the same gender in the Reg stacks, and additions of GAY, lesbos, or fags inevitably follow.

Three of the 14 pieces (21%) use the word “gay” as a generic derogatory term. It’s used in response to a drawing and quote, as a reason for not partying (“Why leave now? Let’s Party For the Rest of the Night. No, I’m gay“, and has been directed towards the Phi Delta Theta fraternity.

Half of the graffiti (four pieces, plus the comments on two same-sex names, mentioned above) makes reference to homosexuality as an insult. Phrases like “Marshall(straight)” and “aileen(NOT HOMO)” make it difficult to read the “proof” for Travis = gay² as an example of “gay” as a generic insult. A recommendation to “do your work nonstop” during fall 2007 concludes “& this advice applies to homosexuals as well“– nothing explicitly negative, but one does not get the sense that LGBTQ students are being singled out positively. More direct is a piece in Latin: “tu es gay, ego > tu” (you are gay, I am better than you). Most recently, “gay/flamer” was used in response to a student’s objection about another student using the word “retarded”.

The pie chart, right, shows the relative distribution of the words used in LGBTQ-directed graffiti. Out of 22 instances (some pieces of graffiti have more than one), “gay” is used 36% of the time, followed by “fag” at 27%. The particular offensiveness of the latter term probably helps account for its use in both pieces of men’s room graffiti. The word was used by itself, without any apparent context from other nearby graffiti. In both cases, the word was neutralized to some extent by the insertion of a strategically placed “L” after the “F”. The two examples from the Reg stacks are somewhat different. One, mentioned above, was in response to two men’s names with a heart. This use was protested, but that response was subsequently trivialized with a “your mom” remark. The other example was captured during one of my earliest trips to take pictures in the stacks, and the original comment is cut off but clear from context. There was an ongoing discussion where insults were being thrown around, and one student wrote “Stop being a ball-sucking fag”. At some point, another student replied: “Tell him. I’m just working with what’s already on the table. And what makes “Asshole” more mature than “ball-sucking fag” anyways? I’d say that the later[sic] is a little more self-aware in this context, you ball-sucking fag.”

That said, even in the face of anti-LGBTQ tautologies (right), there are signs that sexuality is becoming a non-issue. In a Harper men’s room stall, someone wrote “Fags are Gay”, subsequently diffused somewhat when an “l” and “r” were added. But then there’s the follow-up comment: “Definitely so, but who cares dude?” It’s not ideal, but maybe it’s its own kind of progress.

* This corpus documents the walls in the Regenstein bookstacks weekly since September 2007, the A-level whiteboards daily for a few months in early 2008, the study carrels every quarter or so since last summer, the B-level men’s room from earlier this year, and the Harper and Reg bathrooms once in the last week.

¹ Not counting God, why am I gay? which may have been written sincerely rather than as an insult. I’m also not entirely sure what to make of “Joke’s on you– I’m gay” in response to “If men could get pregnant, would you do it?”. It doesn’t necessarily seem homophobic, so I’m not including it in the count.

² There’s also two pieces of graffiti, one from a Crerar men’s bathroom and another from the Reg stacks, that make positive comments about “Asian pussy” and “Black pussy“. Perhaps not racism, but not exactly in good taste.

³ I’m interpreting “misogyny” liberally here– I think at least the proof of women = problems falls more in the category of making a joke out of a phrase that exists in popular culture rather than an insult towards women.

Perhaps to counteract the aforementioned slur, the acrimonious discussion of the UN has been augmented with the thought “I want to see more American Acceptionalism”.

A discussion of pregnancy has sprung up opposite the philosopher wordplay; there’s been two opinions over who wears man thongs (one of which tangentially involves Das Kapital), and there’s four drawings of penises and the only two vagina drawings I’ve found. But all that is what you expect to find in a bathroom stall, and nowhere in the same league as the wit and wordplay that made the B-level men’s room great. Personally, I find it sub-par even compared to what you generally find in the stacks and study carrels, and it reminds me why I generally avoid latrinalia.

As Q said to Captain Picard in the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “All good things must come to an end” and this is the end of the saga of the B-level men’s room, as far as I’m concerned. I wish it could have been painted over in its prime, before it was touched by ugliness. But so it goes.