Head of the Class in College of Letters, Arts and Rap : Pop music: Two Harvard seniors combine their love of black culture and music to publish The Source--’the voice of the rap music industry.’

Officially, Harvard University senior David Mays is majoring in government. According to university records, Mays’ roommate, Jon Shecter, also a senior, is concentrating in English.

But the truth is that the two 21-year-olds are majoring in rap, with a minor in entrepreneurialism.

Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Mays and Shecter, friends since the day early on in their freshman year when they discovered their mutual love for black culture and music, are publisher and editor-in-chief, respectively, of The Source, a monthly magazine they immodestly describe as “the voice of the rap music industry.”

That view apparently extends within the rap music industry as well, where one national executive called The Source “the hippest, dopest, freshest thing to happen to the rap community in a long time.”

Before The Source, “Anything else that was out there dealing with rap tended to be very teeny-bopper oriented, you know, ‘Win a Date With Slick Rick,’ ” Shecter said.

“Very superficial,” Mays agreed.

“We saw the need for a serious publication that took rap music seriously,” Shecter said. “Something that dealt with social and political issues as well as personalities.”

Founded in August, 1988, as a free, one-page newsletter that was launched with $200 of their own money and printed on Mays’ MacIntosh computer in their dorm room at Harvard’s Cabot House, The Source is now a glossy, $1.95-per-issue, full-color magazine with national advertisements and a circulation of 12,000. Its contributors have included former Georgia State Sen. Julian Bond, as well as a coast-to-coast network of reporters. While its founders are negotiating to put The Source on newsstands, the magazine is available mostly through record stores. It is sold in Canada, England, Australia, Holland and Italy as well as in the United States.

Their success has earned Mays and Shecter a staff of six, all fellow Harvard students, a cluttered, $750-per-month office in nearby Somerville and plans to move their venture to New York when they graduate in June. They say they see no reason why one year from now, The Source should not have a circulation of 100,000.

“We saw the need that existed, and we went out and did it,” Shecter said. “Each of us has always been the type of person who has not let our age stop us. We’ve always looked at the real world as something we could conquer, so our age--being young--was never an issue.”

Suddenly escalated from the ranks of mere Ivy League undergraduates to potential music media barons, the two exhibit the kind of confident ambition that invites comparison to a music journalism Wunderkind of a generation ago: Jan Wenner.

But when the name of the founder and publisher of Rolling Stone is mentioned, Mays and Shecter look blank.

“Who?” they finally ask politely.

If the history of contemporary rock journalism is not their forte, a sense of business acumen obviously is. Shecter worked in urban radio while still a high school student in Philadelphia. Mays, a product of the public school system in Washington, arrived at Harvard with a love for black music. By January of their freshman year, the two were co-hosting a weekly show about rap, “Street Beat,” on the Harvard student station, WHRB.

In his sophomore year, Shecter cut a rap single of his own, “B.O.M.C.,” that spoofed the old Joe College stereotype. Mays, meanwhile, was managing a local rap group.

Somewhere along the line, Mays got the idea of “building up a mailing list of our listeners.” Shecter thought he was crazy, Mays said; “He’d say, ‘what’re you doing that for?’ ” But though he still wasn’t sure exactly what he would use the list for, “I knew it would be valuable,” Mays said. “I spent like every hour of our show writing down names and telephone numbers.”

That list became the basis for the first subscription roster of The Source, named for a phrase penned by rap songwriter Kris Parker, better known as KRS-1.

“He says, ‘If you want to hear fresh rhyme, come to The Source,’ ” Mays said.

Shecter’s own description of the average rap music fan as “a 16- to 23-year-old black male” makes these two white Harvard undergraduates something of an anomaly in a world of music that often blasts whites for their treatment of African Americans and other minorities.

“Not many people here white or black are really into black music,” Shecter conceded.

But, he added, “I think it’s anomalous not so much that we are into rap, but that we are actually running a business that is part of the real world.”

Still, they remain sensitive to the suggestion that they are two white kids out to make a buck on a black musical phenomenon. Both come from professional families; their fathers are lawyers, Shecter’s mother is a psychologist and Mays’ mother is a graphic designer who applied for the job of designing The Source but was turned down by the editor and publisher. They are students at a school whose annual tuition costs considerably more than many inner-city families could dream of earning in a year.

But Shecter insists that “this is not a bunch of white people sitting around writing about rap music. This is a coalition of all races, people who love and respect the music and the culture it comes from.

“We want to make money, sure,” he continued, “but we don’t want to forget what we are doing. We always want to be conscious that this is a black art form. We see rap as a major social movement that offers empowerment to African-American people. We want to stay involved in the kind of social activism that goes along with rap.”

Running the magazine has caused Mays and Shecter to rearrange their academy priorities somewhat. To the dismay of their mothers, neither one will be headed to law school next year. Mays still expects to graduate with honors; Shecter rolls his eyes behind Giorgio Armani eyeglasses and adds, “We hope.”

More important to them right now is the music they call “so cool, so raw, so danceable.”

Today, say Shecter and Mays, rap.

And tomorrow?

“More rap.”