You can find sagely advice, lurid invitations and biting social commentary … all within the confines of your local university bathroom stall.

“Give a man a fire and he’s warm for the night. Set a man on fire and he’s warm for the rest of his life.”

“Dick Cheney before he dicks you.”

It’s a medium that ranges from the bathroom stalls to the thin lines of grout between tiles, and its locations stretch from Vilas Hall to Van Vleck.

Graffiti in the bathrooms of the University of Wisconsin can take many forms. From nonsensical phrases to strong opinions laced with profanity, its presence is felt whenever a student has the need to answer nature’s call.

Jerry Niesen, craft-worker supervisor for the University of Wisconsin, thinks that bathroom graffiti is destructive and problematic. His crew works on cleaning graffiti in spurts but on average spends about two to five hours per week removing it from bathrooms.

Niesen and his crew do not work for free.

“It costs the university a lot of money to get rid of it,” Niesen said. These costs more than likely make their way to students’ wallets in the long run.

Rob McDonald, a UW senior, also thinks that graffiti in the bathrooms is destructive.

“It can offend some people, and it’s usually profane,” McDonald said.

But some see the graffiti as a legitimate campus medium.

“It can be great creative expression,” said Jesse Lee Kercheval, professor of English and co-director of creative writing at UW. Kercheval recalled one example of graffiti in which someone said they thought a certain unnamed professor was “a pig.”

Kercheval did not think bathroom graffiti was a problem on campus.

“Helen C. White Library is pretty much graffiti-free,” Kercheval said.

“I spend a lot of time in Grainger,” McDonald said. “I wouldn’t say it’s clean, but the Union is usually worse because it has more people going through it.”

Niesen argues that there is no way of controlling graffiti.

“You can’t control it in the bathrooms because privacy issues come up,” Niesen said.

“You can’t stop it without invading privacy,” McDonald agreed.

Under Wisconsin state law, bathrooms are considered private areas, and surveillance of such areas is considered invasion of privacy and illegal.

“People think they’re being funny, or they’re just bored,” McDonald said.

Although it is hard to be caught displaying your sense of humor in the restroom because of privacy issues, there are penalties for it. Under Wisconsin state statute 943.1, whoever intentionally causes damage to any physical property of another without the person’s consent is guilty of a Class “A” misdemeanor.

Penalties vary for these types of transgressions, but a person found guilty of committing a Class “A” misdemeanor can be sentenced to as much as nine months in a county jail and a $10,000 fine.