Timothy Welbeck, director of the Center for Anti-Racism, has developed a new course exploring the life and work of Kendrick Lamar.

With a pair of wired headphones tucked into his suit jacket, Timothy Welbeck, director of the Center for Anti-Racism, takes his place at the front of the lecture hall. He opens his laptop and spins a few songs for students as they file in. “A.D.H.D.” by Kendrick Lamar fills the room, with ethereal beats and Lamar’s signature tight, verbose, and emotive lyrics, and students bob their heads while preparing for class.

With 27 Grammys, two Emmys, and a Pulitzer Prize, Lamar has solidified his legacy as one of the most prolific hip-hop artists of all time. His debut album, “good kid, m.A.A.d city,” established Lamar as a complex, multi-faceted hip-hop artist whose multi-layered work, Welbeck believes, is ripe for literary analysis. Inspired by the rapper’s legacy, Welbeck launched Temple’s first-ever course dedicated to Kendrick Lamar. 

The class, Kendrick Lamar and the Morale of the m.A.A.d City, offered by the Department of Africology and African American Studies in the College of Liberal Arts, dives into Lamar’s music and biography, using Lamar’s experience as a springboard and support to delve into a variety of topics, such as Black identity, systemic racism, gang violence, sexism and substance abuse. Welbeck encourages students to examine the urban policies that shaped Lamar’s hometown of Compton, California, and how Lamar navigates these topics in his lyrics. Beyond his struggle, this course illuminates how Lamar built himself into one of the greatest hip-hop artists of all time, through self-belief and embrace of Afrocentric influences.   

“In the university classroom, if we can talk about Shakespeare, if we can talk about Beethoven,” said Welbeck, “then we can talk about Kendrick Lamar.” 

The course debuted in fall 2025 and was met with enormous popularity. Several major news outlets, including Billboard and Rolling Stone, shared in the excitement for “a Temple class on Kendrick.” Welbeck’s invention follows a recent trend of university courses dedicated to mega musicians, such as the Taylor Swift class at Harvard University and the recently debuted Bad Bunny course at Yale. At Temple, Welbeck was originally slated to enroll 40 students. By the end of registration, the class capacity had more than doubled to 87 students. Now the class has returned for a second semester, with more eager students enrolled in this contemporary course. 

“I’m a huge Kendrick Lamar fan,” says Niccolo Davis, Class of 2029, a public relations and journalism major. “I rearranged my entire class schedule so I could take this one class.” 

During class sessions, students are immersed in Lamar’s music, listening through his discography track by track. Welbeck is a professor and DJ, as he queues songs to play aloud for the classroom. After several minutes of musical immersion, Welbeck leads a discussion about what students just heard, digging into the stories Lamar weaves through his rap lyrics and the greater historical context for Lamar’s experience. Students are quick to answer Welbeck’s questions, combining their personal knowledge of Lamar’s music with the deeper concepts learned in class and through assigned readings. 

“This course gives us a unique opportunity to talk about difficult things and expand a student’s critical thinking skills,” Welbeck explained. “We talk about the legacy of racism in the United States. We talk about housing segregation, police brutality, apartheid in South Africa. We will have debates about censorship. All connected to Kendrick’s work and music, providing a background track for conversation. A course like this gives us a lens into some of those difficult conversations we may not ordinarily be able to have so plainly.” 

In addition to deep listening and dynamic class discussions, Welbeck’s course is enriched by an impressive roster of guest speakers, including Curtis King, an artist and producer who has worked with Lamar; Marcus J. Moore, author of The Butterfly Effect; Mickey Factz, an artist and rap professor; Justin Tinsley, an ESPN reporter who covered Lamar’s Super Bowl LIX performance; and Cole Cuchna, host of the Dissect podcast. Each guest brought insights from their field to share with students and further examine Lamar’s work. 

“One thing that I’ve really taken away from this class is that it’s bigger than the music,” shared Kania Sullivan-Lee, Class of 2029, a media studies and production major. “We’re not just talking about how talented Kendrick is. This class examines how Kendrick became the artist that he is today, his storytelling, his lyricism, how his words and his music impact the greater society.” 

A musician himself, Welbeck built this course around Lamar to highlight that hip-hop and its artists can provide a fertile ground for students to explore complex topics with confidence. In addition to this course on Lamar, Welbeck has taught three prior hip-hop courses at Temple, including Hip-Hop and Black Culture, No City for Young Men: Hip-Hop and the Narrative of Marginalization, and Tupac and the Hip-Hop Revolution. 

Each of these courses aimed to expand higher education’s view of which people and topics are worthy of study and investigation. Welbeck believes that courses like this can serve as a model for introducing students to an array of interdisciplinary conversations, empowering students to expand their critical thinking and comparative analysis skills. 

“This class has exceeded my expectations,” said Ernie Coney, a Class of 2027 media studies and production major. “I had never taken a hip-hop class in college before. It feels like Temple is in touch because our music plays a big role in our lives. When you can connect the music that we listen to with history and social science, it’s a really powerful experience.” 

While Lamar is exceptionally accomplished, Welbeck reminds students that the legacy of Black and African American artists is embedded in American music history and that Lamar is the continuation of a centuries-old tradition of Black expression. With this class, Welbeck aims to inspire Temple students to expand their understanding of which art and artists are considered worthy of studying in a university classroom.  

“Temple is an innovator, and so it makes sense that a historic course like this could come out of a place like Temple,” Welbeck concluded. “I hope students see how art has the ability to communicate a wide variety of ideas and how we receive a great deal of benefit when we explore diverse perspectives.”