Last night I had to be in the lab at 3 AM (I was waiting for some cells to grow), so I was down in the pool hall really late. I happened to be there when a bunch of wannabe-hard High School kids (Cleevies?) came in to play. Not long thereafter, a couple of CSOs took the kids into custody (or detained them, so that the Portland 5-0 could take them, rather) because they had been spotted earlier tagging around campus. This got me thinking about the state of graffiti at Reed.

When I was a mere froshling, I was genuinely impressed by the graffiti at Reed. In high school, I repainted my room (kind of a diarrhea orange color that was supposed to look sandstone-ish) and wrote out passages from my favorite books in Sharpie on the walls, and the graffiti at Reed struck me as in the same vein but far more interesting and useful. There were real, well-reasoned and evolved conversations taking place above the urinal between people who, because they were in different academic departments, could hold vastly different but similarly intellectually-rich viewpoints on a topic. These people would probably never otherwise debate the points that were being raised on the bathroom wall because they operated in such different academic traditions. I also learned how to write YHWH in Hebrew on the wall above the urinal in the library bathroom, which sticks in my memory since at the time I was in the middle of reading the Old Testament.

Ever since my sophomore year, however, the graffiti has gone way downhill. From the idiotic limericks and 'your mom' jokes (not to mention the racist graffiti from some attention-whoring jerk whose mother apparently never hugged him enough), you'd think this was a Junior High School and we had all just discovered the f-bomb. If I were more charitable, I might think it actually was a bunch of 8th graders sneaking onto campus to write about the girl who once was from Nantucket, but it's much more likely that "New Reed" has corrupted and cheapened what was, in bygone days, an excellent mode of expression for a bunch of tower-bound intellectuals.

I think that graffiti--even apart from its capacity to provide for a debate experience that evolves and is frozen in time--is good for the Reed community. To hit an old cliche, it's yet another way to take control of what would otherwise be a fairly sterile and institutional environment. Like Renn Fayre, but in the bathroom. And like all such democratic technologies, graffiti will be a reflection of the people who use those bathrooms and take the time to write on the wall. But since the graf around here also reflects upon all of us, I wish it weren't just the dumbest shit a guy with a pen could think of. IMHO, it would brighten this place up if we made graffiti the norm again. That would also lessen the bad-boy appeal for throwing 'your mom was great last night' on the stall door, because you'd be exactly as cool and bad for doing so as the guy who just penned a short critique of US policy with regard to governmental oversight above the urinal.

In the same vein, here's a catalog of some MIT campus hacks. That is to say, here's how students at MIT have made the campus their own, and have shown how creative and classy people can be with access to the enormous resources of the ivory tower and the deep well of creativity of the smart people there.

[Via Hack-a-day, in a roundabout sort of way]