DJ Vlad Under Fire After Threatening Princeton Professor’s Job Over Drake, Kendrick Debate

DJ Vlad has come under fire after threatening to have a Princeton professor fired from her job following a disagreement over the heated rap battle between Kendrick Lamar and Drake.

This past weekend, Vlad, the polarizing Ukranian founder and owner of popular digital platform VladTV, took to X, formerly Twitter, to share his thoughts regarding the sound quality of Kendrick Lamar’s latest Drake diss “Not Like Us.”

According to Vlad, the track, produced by DJ Mustard, would’ve benefited from better audio engineering, thus diminishing the song’s potential impact. “Kendrick’s ‘Not Like Us‘ needed a better mix. It takes away from the song,” the former mixtape maven wrote on the platform.

The content creator’s opinion didn’t sit well with fellow X user Morgan Jenkins, a professor at Princeton University, who quoted Vlad’s post while dismissing his feelings regarding the song.

Per Jenkins, who is African-American, Vlad’s racial identity as a white man nullifies any take he has regarding the diss record, as she believes that all conversations of the song should be had by Black people. “You are WHITE,” Jenkins wrote in response to Vlad’s initial post, adding, “This is a BLACK FOLK AFFAIR.”

Taking issue with Jenkins’ assertion that his opinion regarding Hip-Hop lacks merit due to his race, Vlad questioned if the educator thinks the same of her students. “Wait, so a professor at @Princeton is telling me that a white person shouldn’t be allowed to voice their opinion about Hip-Hop? Is that how you interact with your students?” he wrote in a subsequent tweet.

Refusing to back down from her stance, Jenkins reiterated that Vlad’s take on “Not Like Us” was unnecessary in another post, leading Vlad to seemingly threaten her job by making a complaint bring to Jenkins’ superiors at the renowned institution.

“Don’t try to change your words now. I’ll be reaching out to @princeton about this on Monday,” he wrote in response, a move that led a numerous users on social media to voice their displeasure with Vlad’s seeming threat. Some deemed the West Coast rep a “Karen,” while others declared that his inference that he’d negatively impact Jenkins’ job was indicative of her initial appraisal of his cultural standing.

“This is something a white person would do,” one user wrote, with another adding, “You have to see the irony here.”

On Monday (May 6), Vlad attempted to clarify his stance, claiming that he never planned to contact Princeton and was simply trolling Jenkins. “Since it’s Monday, let me clear the air and state that I never had any intention of filing a complaint to Princeton for former professor Morgan Jerkins saying that white people aren’t allowed to comment on Kendrick Lamar’s music. She trolled me and I trolled back,” he wrote.

“At the end of the day, it created an interesting discussion about race relations in America. I will be discussing it further in my future interviews,” he stated. When Jerkins saw the explanation, she fired back: “A lie. He tagged my employer multiple times with the intention to professionally harm me. I didn’t troll. I centered Black people in a discussion on hip-hop and told him to stand down bc it’s not his space. He’s backtracking bc he miscalculated. Btw, stop contacting my family.”

See posts from DJ Vlad’s and Morgan Jenkins’ exchange below.

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