Nietzsche, misanthropy and "Elvis is cool."

Students don't take spray paint to Harvard's ivy and red brick, but in bathroom stalls and secluded study carrels closet graffitists make their statements.

The stuff is diverse. Anguished lit majors scribble attacks on Derrida. Inarticulate crammers write obscenities on nearby walls. And the simply lovesick bemoan humanity.

Take Cabot Science Library. In the bowels of the building is a netherworld of wooden desks known as "pre-med row," where the future physicians of America bury themselves in their schoolwork.

Nurturing must come later in medical training. The general tone down here is typified by a scrawl in one of the first carrels: "Die of AIDS faggot before I smash your head."

Anti-gay, sexist, and generally misanthropic, these comments portray a pretty bleak world-view. "Some days you're the bug," reads one of the more articulate enunciation. "Other days you're the windshield."

"It's nothing that's very deep or profound," says David D. Hebb, a history research assistant, flipping through a book in one of the Cabot carrels a few days ago. "Their concerns seem to be quite limited."

He points to a scribbled "Fucking Nazi assholes" on the wall to his right. "This is pretty typical."

On the other hand who can blame these scientific slaves toiling beneath the earth? "What am I doing?" queries a delicate script. "I have no life. It's nice outside and I'm rotting in the basement of a library."

"That's it!" reads another. "I'm switching my major to government. So long Cabot--hello LIFE!"

In Cabot and elsewhere, cries of anguish mesh with political statements and the occasional metaphysical musing.

"God is dead'--Friedrich Nietzsche.

"'Nietzsche is dead'--God."

And beneath that, in bright blue marker: "Give the Palestinians a state--like New Jersey."

Graffiti, inherently an anti-establishment phenomenon, has been given different explanations by sociologists.