Hip-hop music and culture are powerful intellectual tools that need a higher profile in university education, according to the educators, musicians and activists who participated in the International Association for Hip-Hop Education's first annual conference at the National Music Center on Friday.
"Hip-hop is one of the greatest challenges to the human brain," said Dr. Jules Harrell, chair of the psychology department at Howard University, who wants to train professors to use hip-hop to study the neurological effects of music.
Getting university administrators to approve of the use of themes and elements of hip-hop in the curriculum, however, is not always easy. In a panel discussion at the conference, professors described the challenges of administrative resistance to hip-hop education, which Dr. Harrell described as a "war of attrition."
Getting universities to recognize the academic relevance of hip-hop requires an aggressive and resolute attitude, according to Dr. Larry Ridley, a jazz bassist who was a contemporary of the late Max Roach and a professor at Rutgers University.
"We have to think of ourselves as revolutionaries," he said.
According to Dr. Velma LaPoint, a professor at Howard University, one of the major challenges to establishing a hip-hop curriculum is the lack of recognition of hip-hop-oriented publications in academia.
"We're always fighting the canon," she said.
Dr. LaPoint currently teaches "Black Youth in Hip-Hop" as a special topics course, which has not been officially approved by Howard's curriculum committee. She has also received a grant to create a graduate course on the use of hip-hop in youth education, health and human services.
"Hip-hop can be packaged so it's academically sound," she added.
The panel was moderated by Dr. William Smith, a music professor at American University and the author of "Hip-Hop as Performance and Ritual," who described the difficulty of getting approval for a hip-hop culture class at AU, which is now available only in the summer semester.
Keynote speaker Toni Blackman has a different background in hip-hop education, one that is centered around the cipher, or freestyle circle. Blackman founded the Freestyle Union Cipher Workshop with a dozen emcees in Washington in the early '90s, and since then has been using the art form itself as a form of education.
"The future of hip-hop education is in the cipher," Blackman said. "There is so much wisdom in the cipher."
In her presentation, Blackman spoke of the potential of hip-hop for improving the education system.
"There is a culture of professors who are accessing the power of hip hop," she said. "Who is to say that hip hop professionals will not carry a bigger torch in the future?"
After Blackman's presentation, those who attended the conference put these ideas into action by initiating a brief cipher, in which Blackman, Smith and others performed freestyle rap verses on various sociological and historical topics while everyone else, from the students in attendance to 70-year-old Ridley, provided a cappella beats.
"This is exactly what we've been talking about," Smith said when the cipher was over.
Students came to the conference from Washington-area universities and also from as far away as NYU and Ohio State.
"Education is about students finding their voice and talents," said Jovette Gadson, managing editor of Words Beats and Life, a hip hop journal that cosponsored the conference. "Hip hop is the vehicle."
Throughout the conference, speakers emphasized the relative newness of the initiative to incorporate hip hop into higher education, saying that the biggest innovations are yet to come.
"We haven't even touched the surface of what we are capable of," Blackman said.
