"The Textual Appeal of Tupac Shakur": University in Seattle Offers a Tupac Course

At the University of Washington in Seattle, Tupac was on the curriculum for the fall quarter of 2003. On August 7, 2003, the university introduced the course “The Textual Appeal of Tupac Shakur” in its news service UW News. It ran as a so-called focus group in the Comparative History of Ideas program, an interdisciplinary degree program. About 20 students had enrolled. Those who participated and turned in a final project received two general credits.

Machiavelli, Sun Tzu and Fanon

The course was taught by Georgia Roberts, a doctoral student in English who worked as a tutor in the program. According to her own account, she had been listening to Tupac since the age of 16. Teaching the course was not mandatory for her, nor was she paid extra for it. Her approach: through Tupac’s lyrics, students were to be introduced to challenging classics, to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. As an example of a motif in Tupac’s work, the report also cited Christopher Marlowe’s play about Doctor Faustus. It was about finding a common starting point, Roberts said, a conversation about something students were already talking about. Program director John Toews praised the method as good teaching practice.