When a celebrity has reached the point in their career to deserve a profile story, there might not be anything more disheartening than having the opening anecdote be that of the President of the United States calling them a “jackass.”

Professor Jeffrey McCune knew that no one had taught a course on Kanye West before, but he didn’t expect the sort of media attention that his seminar, “The Politics of Kanye West: Black Genius and Sonic Aesthetics,” would garner. A few days into this semester, media organizations, from Time to Fox, from Complex to Vox, had already written about the class.