Written in 2012 for Sooner yearbook online.

Graffiti can be found in bathrooms across the world. We expect it; we read it. It can make us smile, laugh or shake our heads in disgust. It can feature half-hearted romantic decrees (Sarah ❤ Gary) that one of them is destined not to see, life questions, profanity and grammar police attacks that are bound to also have a mistake that will be fixed by another grammar officer (one assumes of a higher rank).

It is no different on the OU campus. Many a stall door on campus has been covered with the hastily written renderings of the bored.

“I’ve seen profanity and little doodles,” Sequoia Anichini, history of science sophomore says.

“It’s pretty entertaining. Sometimes people go back and forth with what they write.”

This type of graffiti is not a new development. Students in 1969 were also drawing random pictures and writing names and phrases on the nearest hard surface. OUPD officer Bruce Chan says it has not really changed in volume or content since at least the 80s.

“It goes to show you that nothing really ever changes because I’m sure that [graffiti] was there in the 60s,” history junior Randy Williams says.

Williams also mentioned that the graffiti is slightly different in Kaufman Hall. Since this building is the hub of the language department, much of the graffiti is written in foreign languages.

“I always look it up on a translator,” Williams says.

So, why do people write on the walls? Anichini speculated that in the 60s it may have been to spread a message about revolutionary ideas, but the photograph of 1969 graffiti reveals that bathroom graffiti was not even political back then. That means there may be another cause that has stood the test of time.

“They don’t have much self-control or perhaps they have no other outlet to release their desire to be profane for no reason,” Anichini says. “Or maybe they just think it’s funny.”

It is safe to say that graffiti, for better or worse, is not going away anytime soon — unless write-proof walls are in development. Sadly, even the entertaining bits can be easily erased with a few strokes of paint, as it has been recently in buildings across campus.