Old-school attitude?

White boxes dot Marcyliena Morgan's office at Harvard's Department of African and African-American Studies. They subtly remind visitors that these are the last days at the school for Morgan and her academic superstar husband, sociology professor Lawrence Bobo. Their Back Bay house sold quickly, and the movers will arrive later this November day to pack the Run-DMC dolls, board games, vinyl records, videos, and books that make up Morgan's hip-hop archive. The collection came with Morgan from her previous job at UCLA and will follow her to Stanford University, where she begins work as an associate professor in the communication department in January.

Left behind will be the questions raised following the September news that Harvard denied tenure to Morgan, prompting her and Bobo to accept tenured positions at Stanford. Was Morgan's failure due to having an unpopular class on the culture of hip-hop or having only one publication -- 2002's "Language, Discourse and Power in African American Culture" -- since beginning the Harvard job almost three years ago? Was it caused by her lack of hip-hop authenticity, as one of her peers suggests? Or did it have more to do with the derision academia has directed toward hip-hop studies since its infancy in the early 1990s?

"There's nothing whatever that's seriously radical or progressive about hip-hop ideas and values," Martin Kilson, a retired Harvard government professor, wrote two years ago in an opinion piece that ran in the online magazine "The Black Commentator." A year later, scholar John McWhorter and journalist Hugh Pearson gave hip-hop critical beatdowns in The City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute think tank, and New York Newsday, respectively.

Peek inside America's classrooms and you'll find another opinion forming. Hip-hop heads who grew up with the music are becoming professors, dropping knowledge about the culture to their equally enthralled students. Critical studies professor Todd Boyd began teaching his hip-hop course at the University of Southern California in the late '90s; it now draws 150 students each fall. There are about 70 hip-hop classes taught across the country, says Murray Forman, co-editor of "That's the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader," a literary mix tape of academic writing on the subject.

Headlines about the University of California at Berkeley's course on the poetry of Tupac Shakur in the late 1990s have given way to ones this fall about Syracuse University's course on the lyrics of Lil' Kim. University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson writes books about Malcolm X, Marvin Gaye, and Tupac. Locally, a small group of Northeastern University students and professors, including Forman, an assistant professor of communications studies, promote the study of hip-hop at the school through their year-old Hip Hop Studies Collective. Some hip-hop scholars considered the arrival of Morgan's archive in Harvard's prestigious halls as the ultimate sign of the culture's academic acceptance.

"Archiving hip-hop really got credibility that it didn't have before, OK?" says Morgan. "So now it's got credibility, or you can say, 'It's got bank.' You better use it as long as it's got it."

It isn't easy getting an interview with Morgan, who has made rare public comments since the news of her departure broke. She figuratively bobs and weaves, blaming a cold, an appearance on a hip-hop panel at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, and finally the arrival of the movers to avoid meetings. You get the feeling she doesn't like the limelight. But when she finally greets you at her office door at Harvard days before Thanksgiving, she's downright warm. Just give her a moment to deal with the student making an emergency visit to her office.

Let her explain her caginess: "For some people, some parts of their career cycles [are] public. For some people, [they're] not. I would actually prefer mine not to be."

She's petite and stocky, with a mass of natural hair tamed into a curly bob. Her purple sweater and black pants show she doesn't try to keep it real by dressing hip-hop. Morgan starts the chat talkative yet reserved. But by the end she's dishing on how people have accused her of getting a job at Harvard only because of her husband and how Harvard professors with resumes similar to hers have received tenured positions. Harvard policy prevents its president, Lawrence Summers, from discussing how he came to a decision about Morgan's tenure, says Summers's spokesperson. Morgan's department voted unanimously to award her tenure, but Summers had final approval.

Morgan doesn't consider the job at Stanford a step down. In fact, she says she's looking forward to the opportunities to do what she calls her mission -- easing hip-hop scholarship's transition into academia and reaching out to kids of color, not just the inner-city, at-risk kids she thinks her peers usually target.

Critical thinking
At times she sounds ambivalent about the reasons Harvard didn't grant her tenure. She'll tell you she didn't want to leave the tenured position she held in UCLA's anthropology department before arriving in Cambridge; Harvard's prestige made it equally difficult for her and her husband to accept Stanford's offer, she says. Stanford was one of three schools -- the University of Michigan and "someplace else that I said, 'I ain't going there,' " says Morgan -- that the couple had been talking to about jobs for the past 10 years.

"One can argue one [published] book," says Morgan, who'll have a book about the ethnography of underground hip-hop in Los Angeles called "The Real Hip Hop: Battling for Knowledge, Power and Respect in the Underground" released next year by Duke University Press. "It could be one book. It could be that I wasn't loved [by my students] or they loved me after my class. It could be, you know what I mean?"

Ask Greg Thomas, the 20-something Syracuse English professor teaching the Lil' Kim course, "Hip Hop Eshu: Queen Bitch 101," which included a visit to the class by the rapper, and he'll say these decisions are all a matter of public status. He believes his star rose on campus as media interest in his course blossomed this fall. But that didn't happen for Morgan. Search the name "Marcyliena Morgan" on the Lexis/Nexis media database and her name comes up infrequently. Morgan did the right thing by departing, says Thomas. "The last thing you want to do is be disrespected by the same institution that's taking advantage of our work. They can't have it both ways. They can't exploit and disrespect."

In Boyd's mind, Morgan simply wasn't hip-hop. He came to that conclusion back in the late 1990s when Morgan invited Boyd to speak to her UCLA class. Boyd doesn't remember what he said during that talk; he just remembers Morgan wasn't pleased. "She was offended," says Boyd. "Very, very hostile toward what I had to say. When I found out she was at Harvard running a hip-hop archive, I thought that it must be someone else with that same name because this couldn't be the same person at UCLA who was in the same camp as Kilson and McWhorter."

Boyd accuses Morgan of being one of those scholars who jumped on the hip-hop bandwagon to boost their careers despite their lack of background. His short list of respected hip-hop academics includes Dyson; Tricia Rose, author of the seminal 1994 book "Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America"; and himself. "I was there when [hip-hop] was created," says Boyd, displaying one of hip-hop's basic characteristics -- boasting -- "and she was nowhere to be found. So maybe one of the reasons that this [Harvard job] didn't work out is that she didn't have any credibility in the area."

The negative opinions held by Boyd and other player haters don't seem to faze Morgan. "I work hard," she says. "I love my work. I love what I do. I also know that [getting the Harvard job is] politics, it's timing. People can complain, but I think it would be terrible if I had this opportunity and I had the track record for this kind of work and I didn't [do it]."

Morgan doesn't claim to be hip-hop. She won't reveal her age but she'll discuss growing up in Chicago in a "heavy jazz and blues family," she says. "I grew up in an oral culture. . . . That someone would begin rhyming would immediately catch my eye. The whole idea of the elements in hip-hop just fit my entire upbringing."

Compiling data
The archive started after Morgan arrived at UCLA's anthropology department as an assistant professor in 1990. One day a student told Morgan about her boyfriend, who had worked for the now-defunct Fox hip-hop show "Pump It Up." The tapes were going to be destroyed, but the boyfriend decided to store them in his garage. The student thought her boyfriend would want to donate the tapes to Morgan, but he declined.

"To my knowledge the [tapes] haven't resurfaced anywhere," says Morgan, "and what probably happened was what happens to a lot of things -- his mother cleaned out the garage. But that made me realize there's all these valuable objects, information associated with what actually happened. People don't value it because it's about mainly black kids and it's developed by black kids . . . who are poor. And the idea that they may have developed something as absolutely important . . . [as hip-hop] is something that I think many people just are not willing to embrace."

She started gathering the first issues of The Source, Vibe, and other fledgling publications. She interviewed graffiti artists and women working behind the scenes as hip-hop executives. Now half her office is dedicated to the work. Old-school albums take up a portion of one shelf. A top shelf is dominated by magazines. Videos and books fill the lower shelves. The other side of the room houses a wall of her linguistics books -- Morgan considers herself a linguistic anthropologist with an emphasis on African-American women.

She swivels in her chair to face her computer and types in worldhiphop.net -- the address of the archive's fledgling website. When complete, it will show how hip-hop has gone from a Bronx-born culture to one that manifests itself around the globe. The hip-hop archive's official site (hiphoparchive.org/archive/ index2.htm) contains some information about the archive's contents, an abbreviated list of hip-hop courses -- excluding Boyd's -- and some readings and assignments from Morgan's Hip Hop America: Power, Politics and the Word course.

The course is a sensitive subject among Harvard students. Brandon Terry, a senior in Harvard's African and African-American studies department, didn't take it, but he says, "I know for a fact that some people won't interview with you about it because they don't want to burn bridges." Senior Nicholas Barnes isn't one of them. The hip-hop fan took the course last spring and considered himself the class gadfly. His summary of Hip Hop America isn't glowing: "It's a good foundation," he says, "for people [who] don't know anything about hip-hop." He thought Morgan's strong opinions about women in hip-hop gave the course a "slanted" feel; he complained that Morgan failed to concentrate on recent hip-hop artists such as Jay-Z or 50 Cent.

But Hip Hop America is about language and culture, not artists, says Morgan. "It has to be a course that deals with other issues and topics associated with the academy for it to actually work in this setting and not be a one-shot deal."

Morgan does get kudos for the symposiums she held at Harvard. About 25 activists were invited to participate in the first, 2002's "Hip Hop Community Activism and Education Roundtable," which inspired this year's politically minded Hip Hop Convention in Newark, N.J. In "That's the Joint!," Forman gives a shout out to Morgan's conference "All Eyez On Me: Tupac Shakur and the Search for a Modern Hero," where he encountered many of the contributors to his book.

It's the positive that Morgan focuses on as she prepares to move to California. Stanford means access to researchers who study youth, says Morgan. Stanford means giving more public access to the archive than she says she could have in Cambridge. Morgan estimates that 20 people visited the archive this year.

And to those who insist on dimming her shine? "I just want to say," says Morgan, taking a step forward, extending her arms cockily, and reciting one of hip-hop's old-school boasts, " 'How do you like me now?' "