Lupe Fiasco will teach rap at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) next school year, the University has announced.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based school revealed the news in a tweet Friday (May 20) from its Arts at MIT account.
The Grammy award-winning rapper is one of three professionals, who have expertise in the arts and humanities, that were chosen for MIT’s MLK Visiting Professor Program. Eunice Ferreira, an associate professor of theater at Skidmore College, and Louis Massiah, a documentary filmmmaker, were also selected.
“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 official announcement.
When one commenter wrote, “It will be a useless class/degree,” Lupe replied: “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…” The rapper’s reply was later deleted.
Professor Lupe is no stranger to the MIT community. Last year during his CAST residency at the school, he spoke to students about his work as an entrepreneur and community advocate, plus discussed his Society of Spoken Art (SOSA) endeavor.
Along with Nick Montfort, the school’s professor of digital media, Lupe also led a programming competition called Code Cypher that engages teams of MIT students in a one-day creative coding event.
Lupe performed an array of his hits at MIT’s SpringFest in April 2015, courtesy of the MIT Undergraduate Association Events Committee. He told students, at the time, that he wished he had attended college and that he always admired MIT because of its esteemed graduates.
Check out Lupe and MIT’s tweets below: