Soulja Boy says he's the first rapper to become a professor, but there’s a problem with that claim: he’s about a decade and a half too late.
The “Kiss Me Thru The Phone” artist released a new trailer for his seemingly Kai Cenat-inspired Rapper University to his social media accounts on Friday (June 13).
“I was the first rapper to be a dean and a motherfucking professor. Come on, now. I'm here to teach y'all this game, man,” says the 35-year-old in the above clip.
While the “dean” part of the claim requires further examination, it’s clear that Soulja is far from the first emcee to be a professor. A by-no-means-exhaustive list would have to include the following:
In 2022, Lupe Fiasco announced that he would join MIT’s MLK Visiting Professor Program for the 2022-23 academic year. The following year he announced a fellowship at Yale University before joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute in the Fall of 2025.
One of Fiasco’s blog-era contemporaries, Mickey Factz (who runs his own school for lyricism, Pendulum Ink), has taught at NYU’s Clive Davis School of the Arts as an adjunct professor. Black Thought of the Roots has taught there as well.
Long before Fiasco and Factz entered academia, there was Bun B. The Texas hip-hop mainstay began teaching a class on religion and hip-hop at Rice University a decade and a half ago, in 2011. Speaking of Southern spitters, No Limit’s Mia X joined the faculty of Loyola University in 2019.
All of this, of course, exists in a well-defined context of hip-hop studies at the university level, which dates back at least to the 1994 publication of the first scholarly book about the music, Tricia Rose’s seminal Black Noise.
In Soulja Boy’s nearly two-minute Rapper University trailer, the Atlanta music star says his students will learn about brand building, mixtape skills, marketing, confidence, how to turn followers into a community, and how to turn their passion into a profession.
Applications for Soulja Boy’s Rapper University are open now, and submissions are open to artists, producers, teachers, mentors, guest judges, managers, promoters, and more.
During a recent stream, Soulja said those who aspire to join the program have “two weeks” to complete their applications.
Although no air date has been announced, the series is set to air exclusively on Soulja Boy’s official Twitch channel.
