Graffiti found in Blair Hall

Graffiti written Friday night on the walls of Blair Hall targeted students in substance-free housing, characterizing them as gay or Asian. Mathey College administrators said they do not yet know who is behind the vandalism.

The graffiti, written on a whiteboard and a wall in blue dry-erase marker, respectively, read "Dry Dorms = Gay" and "Dry dorms are for Asians." Mathey College Master Antoine Kahn said in an interview yesterday that there was also "something sexist" written but could not provide details.

"I was kind of surprised that someone would bother to do something like that," Nathan Savir '09 said. A hallway wall bordering his room was graffitied. "To me, sub-free dorms are not a big deal. Some people choose not to drink in their rooms."

Kahn called the incident "odd and extremely unpleasant" and said that administrators are working with Public Safety to determine who scrawled the messages on the wall. Public Safety officers could not be reached for comment.

"I heard loud people coming down the stairs around 12:30 [a.m.], and they were saying the f-word," Emily Margolis '10 said, whose whiteboard was graffitied and who lives across the hall from Savir. Five minutes later, Margolis said, one of her roommates, Rachel Nesbitt '10, discovered the vandalism as she returned to the room.

Students in the dorm erased the writing from the whiteboard and tried unsuccessfully to scrub the other graffiti off the wall. Their RCA, Emily Stoltzenberg '07, covered the writing with paper until it was painted over yesterday. She is also a columnist for The Daily Princetonian.

Some students in Blair, however, say it could be someone from outside the University.

"One of my 'zees saw the group in the basement and got the sense that they weren't from Princeton," Stolzenberg said. "They were asking the sort of questions that would suggest unfamiliarity with campus geography."

The graffiti contained slang not commonly used at Princeton.

"[We] suspected that it might not be a Princeton student because they called it 'dry dorms,' " Savir said. "Everyone here calls it 'sub-free.' "

Stoltzenberg said the graffiti "showed a complete misunderstanding of the variety of reasons that people would choose a sub-free dorm and a lack of respect." But, she said, she was "really proud" of her advisees for trying to clean up the graffiti.

"Their response to someone else's stupidity was so mature and levelheaded," she added.