Lupe Fiasco has been long regarded as one of the more esteemed voices in Hip Hop, a gifted and intricate rhymer who could teach a course or two on wordplay. Thanks to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Food & Liquor rapper is set to become not only part of the curriculum but become a professor.
On Friday (May 20), MIT announced the appointments for its MLK Visiting Professor program for the 2022-23 school year. Alongside Lupe, associate professor of theater Eunice Ferreira and documentary filmmaker Louis Massiah were named as experts in arts and humanities.
“I been holding this for a while. I’ll put together something more sophisticated later that really captures the nuance and gravity but for now I’ll just say it straight and raw: I’m going to teach Rap at
@MIT,” Lupe tweeted following the announcement.
When a fan claimed learning under Lupe would result in a “useless” degree, Lupe quickly hit back in a since-deleted tweet, writing, “Syllabus isn’t built yet but I’m thinking its fruit to be had in looking at neuromorphic computation through the lens of Rap as a lossless data compression model with a dash of energy efficiency via refining Landauer’s principle applied to cytoarchitectonics. And some rapping…”
Lupe joins a number of Hip Hop luminaries who added the title of professor to their résumé. In 2020, TI teamed up with Dr. Melva K. Williams to teach the “Business of Trap Music” course at Clark Atlanta University. Famed producer 9th Wonderpreviously taught at North Carolina Central University, the University of Virginia, Duke University and other institutions and is now set to teach at Jay Z's Roc Nation School of Music, Sports and Entertainment at Long Island University.
