Ronald Reagan was “America’s version of Adolph Hitler,” says
Todd Boyd, a tenured professor of hip-hop at the University of
Southern California. Reagan was “a sad-ass actor” and “white in the
worst possible way.”
The Los Angeles Times calls
Boyd “Notorious PhD.” He will show up for class in sunglasses and a
cravat, or more casually “wearing a blue Orlando Magic jersey over
a gray T-shirt,” reports the Times.
Tenure has given Boyd the green light to behave like a jackass,
says the Times: “He says it was upon winning tenure six
years ago that he decided to follow his instincts, figuring he had
nothing to fear.”
California’s fondness for hip-hop hucksters — Governor Gray
Davis made Caribbean literature professor Quincy Troupe the state’s
poet laureate until it emerged that he hadn’t graduated from
Grambling — is another safety net underneath Boyd. He can say
anything and get away it. “He is perpetually in demand by reporters
to pass judgment on everything about race from pimp fashion to
radio programming to the historical validity of a mysterious black
caddy in ‘The Legend of Bagger Vance,’” reports the
Times.
And USC is happy to humor him. “Boyd’s talent for news-media
visibility,” reports the Times, has “helped USC present
itself as a more diverse campus.”
USC’s trustees apparently don’t even mind that his favorite word
is “nigga.” His new book is titled The New H.N.I.C.,”
which stands for “Head Nigga in Charge.”
“Frankly I love the word ‘nigga.’ It is my favorite word in the
English language because no other word incites more controversy
today,” he says. He uses it to remind people that racism still
exists (even if that means he has to furnish the racism) and to
assert mindless independence: “any time anybody tells me there’s
something I can’t say, you can be sure I’m going to say it as many
times as I possibly can.”
Boyd likens his academic career to Michael Jordan’s basketball
career, says the Times. Before tenure, Boyd couldn’t speak
so wildly, just as Jordan couldn’t dunk wildly during his college
days under the disciplined Dean Smith. But after tenure, Boyd says
he could “shake things up,” just as Jordan, liberated by a cosseted
career in the NBA, could “take some chances that other players
couldn’t take.”
Boyd flunked out of the University of Florida, according to the
Times, but recovered after he learned that he could watch
movies for academic credit in critical studies classes. He ended up
with a Ph.D. in critical studies at the University of Iowa.
Teaching the worst examples of English has made him a prized
professor of literature at USC. The Times quotes Michael
Dear, the director of the university’s Southern California Studies
Center, lauding Boyd’s versatility: “He can write academic jargon,
he can do jive. He can do rap and Shakespeare. He’s a
wordsmith.”
Are USC students getting shortchanged? No, they get a chance to
“keep it real.” But not so real that they can disturb Boyd’s
self-indulgent stream of consciousness. Boyd, as the Times
relates, instructs students not to ask questions during his hip-hop
lectures, because “when I get into my groove, I’m like in a
different space; I don’t like my groove to be interrupted.”
Boyd wishes he “was a rapper.” But he’ll settle for his tenured
professorship since it allows him to drop “intellectual bombs.”
California’s academic establishment doesn’t mind if those bombs
drop on their students. Even as test scores indicate that students
don’t know basic English, California schools continue to mainstream
the substandard English of hip-hop. Even as educators bemoan ghetto
violence, they bring rap’s glorification of ghetto violence into
their classrooms.
And as the proliferation of tenured fakes like Boyd illustrates,
students can’t even escape the insanity at the college level. As
California’s college educators rail against the “violence of war,”
they welcome the violence of rap.
Determined to breed their own destroyers, they grant tenure to
professors who promote a culture of nihilism. Such is their
commitment to civility they’ll give tenure to a charlatan whose
favorite word is “nigga.”
