Southern Michigan University was different from a lot of the other universities in the state–like Michigan State or U of M–in that it was closer to a 50-50 mix of ideologies in students rather than the 85-15 or 90-10 in favor of the left that you tended to see elsewhere. I’ve heard plenty of theories about why that is, but honestly I think that since the place is cheaper it tends to attract a lot of farmer’s kids and such.

At times the roiling conflict between the two groups breaks out into open antagonism. The best example I can think of was in the mid-2000s, around the time of the 2004 election, when acrimonious feelings were felt on both sides with no outlet because the lefties and the righties ran with different social groups that were active at different times of the day. As a result their antagonism took the only rout available to it: chalk.

Student groups had long used chalk to scribble advertisements for events and such, but when the discussion turned to politics it became bitter. At first the chalkings only supported candidates of choice, but it was a short road from there to insulting candidates of differing persuasions, insulting candidates of differing persuasions with bad swears, insulting candidates of differing persuasionswith claims of simian ancestry, and insulting candidates of differing persuasions with crude sexual references. Vandalism was the next logical step.

SMU sutdents formed anti-chalking brigates to seek out and alter, chalk over, or wash away rival messages. In the resulting melee, local stores ran out of the preferred pink and blue colors, reducing the rivals to using nigh-invisible yellow and green chalk or pinching flimsy white chalk from classrooms. I remember sitting idly looking out the window in a particularly boring class and seeing, in the space of ten minutes, a chalking deployed, vandalized, washed away, and replaced.

In the end, the Chalk-A-Lot War was decided in favor of nobody: the administration began enforcing a long-ignored prohibition on chalkings and had maintenence wash them away as soon as they were chalked.