Jeff Miller/UW-Madison
Kelsey Van Ert performs a spoken-word piece at the Memorial Union Terrace during the Hot Summer Nights music series in 2007. Van Ert is a member of the inaugural First Wave class.
UW-Madison’s First Wave program, the only full-tuition hip-hop scholarship at a Big Ten university, has confirmed it is not accepting any applications for the 2018-19 academic year. This comes amid other potential sweeping changes to the First Wave, which recruits spoken word artists, rappers and poets from around the country.
It is the first break between cohorts in the program’s illustrious 10-year history, and reactions around campus and beyond to a planned restructuring have been mixed.
Zhalarina Sanders, a First Wave alum who is completing a master’s degree in counseling psychology, says she was initially concerned when she heard about the decision to skip a cohort, but soon came to understand that there might be a need for it.
Other First Wave scholars declined interviews, saying they were still collecting their thoughts. Senior Denzel Taylor described the change as a way to give the staff of First Wave a chance to “catch their breath.”
The decision, which has not previously been announced publicly, marks a major restructuring period for the nationally renowned undergraduate program, which has produced many notable alumni, including Michael Penn II, a freelance writer who raps under the name CRASHprez, and Danez Smith, a winner of a Lambda Literary Award.
The first-ever internal review of First Wave began about four years ago, before this decision was made, and is still ongoing. The review is part of a larger drive within the university to examine diversity-based programs and offices that fall within UW-Madison’s Division of Diversity, Equity & Educational Achievement, such as the Posse and the PEOPLE program, which is a college preparatory program primarily for first-generation and low-income students.
“I’ll stress that this is not a singling out of First Wave by any means,” says Patrick Sims, UW-Madison chief diversity officer and vice provost. “All of the programs are going through this.”
In the case of First Wave, which Sims says leans on models that are “not sustainable” in “a lot of ways,” this means that several significant changes are on the table.
Willie Ney — the program’s co-founder and longtime executive director, who retired earlier this summer — had no input on the decision to skip a cohort for the 2018-19 school year, according to Mary Carr Lee, communications director for Sims' office. Ney was not available for comment.
Jeff Miller/UW-Madison
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Lana Simpson, at right, performs during an informal hip-hop dance session at the Memorial Union Terrace in 2007. Simpson is one of the first students in UW-Madison's First Wave Spoken Word and Urban Arts Learning Community.
First Wave has welcomed a new cohort on campus every year since the program started in 2007. According to Sims, the plan is for the program to have a one-year break beginning in the 2018 fall semester, with applications for 15 open First Wave slots for the 2019-20 academic year opening in August 2018.
“If you’re going to change your process, you don’t want to bring someone in midstream when things are changing,” Sims says. “It would be disingenuous to bring someone into the program without having a clear or articulated sense of how that program is going to look moving forward.”
Sims says one option is to broaden First Wave into a generalized art scholarship; that idea prompts concerns from students and alums who fear the program will lose its hip-hop-focus.
“We still can’t lose those elements of hip-hop, especially in a town like Madison," says Ricardo Cortez de la Cruz II, a UW senior and current First Wave student, who notes that some bars in Madison impose "random codes" on how people can dress and won't host hip-hop acts. “I think the city of Madison needs some hip-hop because it seems like we’re being banned everywhere else.”
He thinks the program is already broad enough. Sanders agrees.
“As a practitioner and a lover of hip-hop, and understanding that the whole point [of the scholarship] was hip-hop, that is disappointing and it makes me [wonder] what that would look like in the future,” Sanders says. “And what sorts of students would then be recruited into the program? What would their medium be?”
Sims says the university is also mulling whether to continue to allow students from other institutions to transfer into the First Wave program.
This potential change also troubles Sanders, who transferred into the program after her first year at Tampa Bay’s Hillsborough Community College; a mentor convinced her to apply for the scholarship. She is one of 17 children, only two of whom went to college. “Had I not had that second chance, another year to try, I wouldn’t have been in First Wave and very, very likely not a student at the UW,” says Sanders.
Sims stresses that First Wave’s budget, which is $366,750 a year, will not be decreased. Instead, his office is in the process of working to determine the best ways to spend that money and reposition the program. One way could be to “scale back” future Line Breaks Festivals, an annual showcase for new cohorts.
“One of the challenges we’re wrestling with is, ‘How do we provide these experiences for students in a predominantly white institution where the arts faculty are not necessarily as equipped to engage with them?’” Sims asks.
As First Wave’s 11th cohort is about to begin fall classes, and while its 12th awaits 2019, Sims’ division is working to determine the program’s future direction.
[Editor's note: This article was changed to reflect the correct budget figure for the First Wave program.]
