On Toilet Graffiti

In the vacations I try to work in student spaces rather than my office. I think it’s valuable to experience students’ geography of the University, so I’ve been working in the library.

You get to see things if you do this. Concrete, specific things. You see students working hard in the morning; groups of friends rounding each other up to go for lunch; smaller groups of students coming back. You see how the high-up clocks have not been changed to summer time, but the low-down ones have. You see how few books are used, how the cafe is more popular than the IT suite. You see how the statue outside traces out the day by standing still like a sundial, and how students chasing the sunbeam around the windows do the same thing by moving like cats. I’d recommend that any teacher spends a day like this occasionally.

This blog post is about some graffiti I saw in the library toilets. It wasn’t obscene at all. The text was “Duncan The Tall Was Here” and it was written perhaps eight feet up the wall, right up at the join with the ceiling. 

Pencil Graffiti

The thing I found remarkable was that it was written in pencil. I kept turning this over in my mind. Pencil. Graffiti in pencil. Toilet graffiti in pencil. How to interpret this? Pencil could just have been what was in their pocket when inspiration struck, or perhaps this student rummaged in their pencil case and missed a sharpie out of luck. I can’t know what the real circumstances were, so I am presented with a symbol. Unlike pen, pencil can be rubbed out. Like the polite message from Duncan the Tall, this is perhaps a polite medium: it is prepared to defer to a blank wall, if you’d prefer.

But as the sun sank and the glare scattered the students from the window tables on the second floor, I thought of bell hooks writing about her academic move out of the Ivy League. 

In the privileged liberal arts colleges, it is acceptable for professors to respect the "voice" of any student who wants to make a point. Many students in those institutions feel they are entitled-that their voices deserve to be heard. But students in public institutions, mostly from working-class backgrounds, come to college assuming that professors see them as having nothing of value to say, no valuable contribution to make to a dialectical exchange of ideas.

Teaching to Transgress, Chapter 10 “Building a Teaching Community”

She described brilliant students outside the prestige of Yale who didn’t demand that their views were worth hearing, and how she spent a great deal of time convincing them that they were entitled to be heard. To have their ideas considered - and challenged - by an academic community. And I thought of the way Duncan the Tall had done graffiti using a pencil, making marks designed to be removed. The entitlement of doing graffiti, and the abasement of doing it in pencil.

Student Behaviours

Antisocial student behaviour isn’t always as meek as pencil graffiti. At the heart of the cartoonish horror of institutions like Oxford’s Bullingdon Club is something very un-timid. Restaurants smashed up, banknotes flung down on splintered tables. Material damage enabled by financial wealth, yes, but also enabled by an iron-clad sense of social entitlement. Unlike pencil graffiti, you can’t unbreak a table with a kick-stool from the stacks and a worn-down eraser from lost property. There’s a symbolism in the Bullingdon story of people who believe that the world was made for them. There’s a symbolism in the pencil graffiti of someone who believes that the world was not.

I read hooks a lot while I taught at Oxford, because she saw the value in entitlement. You can certainly be too arrogant, but gosh you can also be too meek. To grow as a person, you need to push in ways which bring you into disagreement and conflict. Trusting your own judgement and acting deliberately are things the Bullingdon story gets right, even if these virtues are not harnessed to good ends. Gaining entitlement is an important part of an education for many students.

So I’m not demanding that Duncan should consider spray paint next time, but there are socially productive versions of moving away from pencil graffiti. Making a scientific argument is certainly a graduate skill, but the entitlement to make a novel or unfamiliar argument to a senior scientist demands something social beyond merely grasping concepts. You need to believe that you have something to say which is worth hearing.

Course Design

It’s that space between graduates’ skills and characters which has fascinated me about Duncan’s graffiti. Liverpool explicitly aims to create confident graduates, and working in the library has given me an offbeat way of constructing this ambition. Would a more confident student have done graffiti in pen, or would they have gone back to their desk and made notes in pencil? Does the design of Duncan’s degree have too much pencil or not enough chances to say something? These are fun questions.