A doctoral student at taxpayer-funded Clemson University has created and submitted a rap album for his Ph.D. dissertation.
The budding, would-be Ph.D. rapper, A.D. Carson, defended his urban street poetry dissertation in Clemson’s rhetorics, communication and information design program last week, according to Inside Higher Education.
Carson’s 34-song rap album, which he expects to use to obtain the ultra-high-level academic degree, is entitled “Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes and Revolutions.”
“The dissertation is really just a — man, that’s like, in a real, practical way just it’s, uh, it’s a rap album,” Carson says in a YouTube video about busting rhymes to acquire a Ph.D. “Rather than it being, like, about rap or it being about, like, spoken word, it’s actually done through those particular modes of presentation.”
“I’m striving to be dope,” Carson also explains in the video. “This world of academia, or however, you know, we want to describe it, is that world not ready for that dope in its — like — uncut form?”
“I’m just saying that I want to add something to the conversation from being a participant in the hip-hop world as well as a participant in the academic world in this particular mode,” he says.
“Very basically, I’m trying to be dope and do dope shit.”
Urban Dictionary describes the word “dope,” as Carson uses it, as “literally the mack-Daddy of all phrases relating to cool, sick or awesome.”
“Many are already enjoying” Carson’s Ph.D. thesis, according to Inside Higher Ed.
According to Clemson’s rhetorics, communication and information design program webpage, the program “offers a cross-cultural, transdisciplinary curriculum with a conceptual emphasis on knowing, doing, and making — or theoretical, practical, and productive approaches to knowledge.” Graduates “take positions, for the most part, in departments of English and Communication Studies, as well as departments of New Media.”
Clemson University is most famous, of course, because school officials swiftly apologized in for serving Mexican food during a food-themed “Maximum Mexican” night in campus cafeterias in 2015. Two students had complained about the ongoing cafeteria fiesta. One of them tweeted an image of cafeteria workers wearing sombreros. The caption of the tweet — which later appears to have disappeared — was: “Our culture isn’t a costume and we will not be mocked!” (RELATED: Taxpayer-Funded University Apologizes For Offending Mexicans By SERVING TACOS)
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