The best read graffiti of them all? My personal favourite was in a library bathroom at the university where I did my worthless undergrad. Someone had written “Jesus Saves!” in all apparent earnestness, and another, presumably Muslim student had added “But Allah puts in the rebound!” Burn.

Quinn Dombrowski went to the University of Chicago because Quinn Dombrowski is a great big giant nerd. She is cheerfully geeky, insistently nerdy. Quinn Dombrowski is such a huge nerd she frets that the University of Chicago is becoming too social — that the university has been gently cultivating a more well-adjusted, outgoing student body, which clashes with its famously studious reputation, which is why she went there to begin with. She has been worrying a lot about this lately. For the past two years she has made a quiet project of studying graffiti at the Regenstein Library, the school’s largest library, and during that time she has noticed an increase in fraternity and sorority letters scrawled into its pale walls and wooden carrels.

She also has concluded, after careful “statistical analysis” of the more than 1,700 pieces of graffiti she has documented at the Reg since September 27, 2007 — and judging by the words and doodles she has found scrawled — that a University of Chicago student is 63 percent more likely to be happy than sad. How does she know this? Because she categorized student graffiti into a handful of topics such as sex, school spirit and advice; transcribed and interpreted each piece of graffiti; converted her findings into spreadsheet data; then, using simple math, she crunched and considered her data. But in general, according to their scribblings, students hate chemistry, finals, themselves, the University of Chicago, everyone, Obama — and that’s about it.