Hip-Hop's entry into the Ivy League

The blog The Ivy gate has two great stories about the influence of Hip Hop in Ivy league circles. Here are two recent post on the creeping influence of Hip Hops entry into America’s Ivy league schools. About a month back I posted an article about the absurd arguments presented by “if I speak so fast you will think I’m smart” AKA Professor Michael Dyson who just joined the Georegtowne faculty!

Harvard's Hip-Hopaissance

Larry Summers' amusing habit of antagonizing Harvard's African-American Studies Department is no more. Drew Faust has hired back Marcyliena Morgan, a scholar of hip-hop culture, along with her husband, Lawrence D. Bobo, a prominent sociologist.
The pair had left Harvard for Stanford after our friend Larry overrode the unanimous vote of the African-American Studies Department to grant Morgan tenure. Still, Summers had a strong case: Morgan had published just a single book and her classes received lukewarm reviews from students.

According to the Crimson, Faust made a personal appeal to the couple, and the African American Studies Department "wooed the pair this summer over dinners in Cambridge and Martha's Vineyard." Incredible! That's the same way Yale got Young Jeezy to lecture!

Morgan is the proud author of shining pseudo-scholarship such as this:

"Much more than CNN, hiphop brought back the search for reality and truth within a modern, highly advanced world of ideas, technology and modes of communication. For many youth, hiphop conducts its real business in the counter public where it is actualized through a central edict that is constantly repeated and reframed: represent, recognize and come correct."

Sometimes, especially if it's a cold, lonely night, I look at the moon and think I can hear the ghost of Larry Summers, howling in pain as Drew Faust, Spawn of Satan, undoes all his finest work.



Cornel West Drops New Album, Larry Summers Still Scared of Black People

The Ivy League's resident black radical and pop-scholar phenom Cornel West returns to hipster-hop with the release of his second rap album, Never Forget: A Journey of Revelations, featuring the likes of Prince, Talib Kweli, Andre 3000, KRS-One, Jill Scott, Rhymefest, and the late Gerald Levert. Which is impressive and all, but seriously, where's Kanye? This is totally up his alley. They even have the same last name!

Professor West's first album, 2001's Sketches of my Culture, predicated the professor's public spat with Harvard ex-prez Larry Summers and the professor's subsequent break from the university in favor of Princeton. Though his new boss, Princeton president Shirley Tilghman, has yet to comment on Never Forget, West thinks she'll be hipper to the project than Summers was. In a Boston Globe article West speculates,"I think she'll be much more open than Brother Summers," he says. "The hip-hop scared him. It's a stereotypical reaction."

A vocal opponent of misogyny and hedonism in contemporary hip-hop, West portrays his music as a "danceable education" reaching towards the genre's socially progressive roots. "We'll go from the bling-bling to Let Freedom Ring" Brother West raps in "Bushonomics," before giving a shout-out to militant beat poet Gil Scott-Heron. The track features New York MC and black progressive Talib Kweli denouncing "voter registration with no scope of education," "whore-mongerers," and "war-mongerers" alike. Listen to it, and Prince collaboration "Dear Mr. Man," below.