Hip-hop courses expand in college classrooms
On a recent gray and dreary day at Princeton University, lecturer Chesney Snow stood in a studio at the Lewis Center for the Arts, watching students role-play on yoga mats. The scene looked like a rehearsal and a seminar at the same time—Nikes and shell-toe Adidas, Pumas, a black upright piano thumping out notes while performers shifted their bodies into focus.
“Center yourselves,” Mr. Snow told them. “Being vulnerable in hip-hop is really, really central to the work that we have to do.” It was the kind of instruction that sounds a little soft until you see the seriousness in the room—students preparing to perform spoken word and body movements as part of a course that treats the genre like art, history, and scholarship.
The class is called Miss-Education: The Women of Hip-Hop. Although it’s an elective at Princeton, hip-hop studies has been climbing in academia for years, evolving from early offerings to minors and certificates, and now in some places to full degrees. Hip-hop education, educators say, is no longer just a side topic or a novelty. It’s becoming a way to bridge academic theory with lived experience—though, as one faculty member put it, the academy took a while to catch up.
Some of the growth is easy to trace. Misryoum newsroom reporting notes that Howard University taught the first hip-hop class in 1991, and the subject has since spread into structured programs, research centers, and fellowships. Harvard University started the Marcyliena H. Morgan Hip Hop Archive & Research Center in 2002. In 2012, the University of Arizona was the first to offer a minor in hip-hop studies. A year later, Harvard offered the first Nasir Jones Hip Hop Fellowship. More recently, Loyola University New Orleans offered the first Bachelor of Science in Hip Hop and R&B in 2021, and in January of this year the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign board of trustees approved a Bachelor of Arts degree in Hip Hop Culture and the Arts—while the Illinois Board of Higher Education is reviewing the proposal.
Part of the reason administrators seem willing to invest is what students think they’re buying with their tuition. Bachelor’s programs in hip-hop signal not just curiosity, but a belief that four years of study can lead to marketable careers. Misryoum newsroom reporting describes pathways ranging from artists and producers to teaching and research—framed by some educators as similar to the way jazz once moved into universities, long before it was fully treated as serious study.
At Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute, dean Fred Bronstein described how a major emerged from a popular class that composer and pianist Wendel Patrick started teaching in 2018. Misryoum newsroom reporting says enrollment in the course has tripled over the last five years. Mr. Bronstein said the program blends Peabody’s music engineering and technology programs with performance training. He also noted that Mr. Patrick recruited Grammy Award-winning rapper Lupe Fiasco to be a visiting professor, underscoring how the curriculum isn’t only about theory—it’s built to train students as musicians and thinkers.
And it’s not just about performance, either. Misryoum newsroom reporting points to examples where hip-hop is used as an academic lens for social issues and history. Timothy Welbeck, an assistant professor of Africology and African American Studies and the director of the Center for Anti-Racism at Temple University, began teaching a class called Kendrick Lamar and the Morale of m.A.A.d City. The course uses five of Mr. Lamar’s studio albums—described as a blend of Black music art forms such as rap, jazz, and rhythm and blues—to discuss themes like police brutality, housing segregation, and urban policy. “It’s a legitimate form of academic study,” Mr. Welbeck said, adding that it took a long time for the academy to figure that out.
Back at Princeton, that academic seriousness shows up in the assignments. Students in Mr. Snow’s class read scholarly books, learn the importance of documenting history, and conduct research through interviews. Performance comes next, with original student pieces in the pipeline. Second-year neuroscience major Rachel Adjei said what pulled her in was the title—Miss-Education—along with the promise that the course would ask students to embody the genre on stage, not just analyze it.
There’s also a practical tension on campus: the cost of college. Misryoum newsroom reporting says faculty understand that parents paying more than $80,000 a year for their children to attend college might be dubious. But educators argue that as hip-hop expands, so do opportunities that don’t involve performing. Students, at least, seem to be voting with their enrollment—and with their willingness to treat a genre once dismissed as a fad as something worth studying deeply.
When Jediah Worrell, a second-year African American studies major, performed in Mr. Snow’s class, she was grinning as she raced to a microphone in front of a camera. On Zoom, rapper Rah Digga smiled back and answered her questions. “My mom’s response was, ‘So when are you going to take a serious class?’” she laughed, shaking her head. She tried to explain that for her—African American studies major—the course is part of the field, part of culture, the interior of Black life. And then, like the lesson itself, she left the room holding more than one idea at once, because maybe the “seriousness” was never in doubt—just the timing.
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