As the one full-time poet at CSUEB (I say “full-time” because there are, and have always been, many others; poetry tends to be something one does AFTER the real or metaphorical time clock gets punched), I am often asked what I think about rap and hip-hop. Rap? Hip-hop? Are they real poetry? Do I like them? Do I teach them?

I teach meter; I teach rhyme. And in doing so, I try to introduce what works in rhyme and meter (and what does not) in the poetry of our era: rap and hip-hop. I have to confess that while I love both meter and rhyme, as a 64-year-old white lady, “rapping” isn’t exactly what I consider something I can do without looking rather odd. Not my “thang.”

But I do encourage my students to rap well. I hope they do. At our poetry readings the students who are good at delivery, as rappers are, really can put across a message, moving the audience emotionally, and also politically, since the origins of rap are in political protest. And what we all can mourn, I believe, is the commercial market’s co-opting of rap and hip-hop for its own purposes for many years now.

This week I came across a wonderful example of a rap honoring Yuri Kochiyama, who received an honorary doctorate here at Cal State East Bay during the commencement ceremonies of 2010, and who has just died at the ripe old age of 93, having spent much of her life as a civil rights activist. It was Kochiyama who held Malcolm X’s head in her hands as he bled out on that fateful day of his assassination. And it was Kochiyama who kept on keeping on into old age. See the recent, very fine rap of Blue Scholars, the hip-hop duo from Seattle, whose refrain is “ When I grow up I wanna be just like Yuri Kochiyama.”

Please listen to this: http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/06/02/318072652/japanese-american-activist-and-malcolm-x-ally-dies-at-93?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social

Her death on June 1^st in Berkeley has made me think about those we will honor at this year’s 2014 commencement ceremonies. It’s exciting to think that the founder of the Bay Area’s iconic jazz venue Yoshi’s, Yoshie Akiba, will be receiving an honorary doctorate on Saturday, June 14, at the undergraduate commencement.

But what are we to make of the honorary doctorate to be conferred upon Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr. at the commencement for M.A. candidates on Friday, June 13? The campus is grateful for the funds already received from his Bechtel Foundation. But the history of the Bechtel Corporation, from which the billions that enable the Foundation to be philanthropic, is perhaps less well known to today’s graduates. To Bechtel’s credit are such feats of engineering as the Hoover Dam and the tunnel between France and England; closer to home, Bechtel’s involvement in Bay Area projects like the Bay Bridge and BART are well known and respected.

But Bechtel, one of the country’s largest engineering and construction companies, has profited, since its inception, from the many wars the US has engaged in, right up to and including the war in Iraq. Those of us who protested the development and public financing of nuclear power in the 1980s, with all its dangers, connect Bechtel with that industry, its proliferation and its attendant problems processing nuclear waste—as do people today who are concerned about the privatizing of water rights, also something Bechtel is involved in. Since the founder’s, Warren A. Bechtel’s, (Stephen Bechtel’s grandfather’s) era, the connection between government contracts and the company’s influence over policy has been well documented.

Conferring upon Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr. this honorary doctorate, based upon current philanthropic ventures, may expunge, in some minds, the history of his family’s business since the turn of the century. But does it? I ask: What rhymes with Bechtel?

Susan Gubernat is a professor in the creative writing program in CSUEB’s English Department and serves as a senator and member of the Executive Committee of the CSU’s statewide senate.