Earlier this year, it was announced that Harvard University had honoured Nas with the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship to support the “achievements of those who demonstrate exceptional capacity for productive scholarship and exceptional creative ability in the arts, in connection with Hiphop.”

This week, the Queensbridge rapper officially introduced the Nasir Jones Hiphop fellowship at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

According to Rolling Stone, when Nas was asked by Henry Louis Gates, director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, to lend his name to the project the rapper said yes “in a nanosecond.”

For Nas, the legendary rapper has always recognised the importance of hip-hop in education – “Hip-hop is important like computer science. The world is changing. If you want to understand the youth, listen to the music. This is what’s happening right underneath your nose.”