By Peter Schmidt

Here is some comforting news for former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as he embarks on his new job as a visiting professor at Texas Tech University: No matter how much some people despise him, no matter what evil deeds he has been accused of, he hardly ranks as the most controversial figure ever to make the transition from public office to academe.

Not even close.

Sure, Mr. Gonzales, who officially joined the faculty at Texas Tech last week, has been widely accused of disregarding the Geneva Conventions and condoning torture during his time in President George W. Bush's administration. But that pales in comparison with the reputation for realpolitik-based ruthlessness that Henry A. Kissinger had acquired by the time he joined Georgetown's faculty, in 1977.

Some argue that Mr. Gonzales has shown disrespect for the Constitution. Robert E. Lee led an entire army in rebellion against the federal government. But that did not disqualify him from assuming the presidency of Washington College, in Virginia, after the Civil War. Indeed, his role as a Confederate general no doubt strengthened his candidacy for the job, even though Lee himself worried that his presence might make the campus a target of hostility. (Upon his death, the institution was renamed Washington and Lee University.)

For all the accusations being made against him, Mr. Gonzales has not been charged with any crimes, let alone convicted. That's more than can be said of former U.S. Rep. Daniel D. Rostenkowski, a Democrat of Illinois, who pleaded guilty to two felony counts of mail fraud in 1996 and now is listed as a senior fellow at Loyola University Chicago and occasionally lectures on politics there and at Northwestern University. He is known to quip to students about his time "at Oxford," referring not to the venerable British university but to the federal prison in Oxford, Wis., where he served most of his 17-month sentence.

So far the opposition to Mr. Gonzales's appointment at Texas Tech has amounted to a few critical editorials in its student newspaper and others, a faculty petition, and two Facebook groups. It pales in comparison to the resistance that Condoleezza Rice has encountered in going back to Stanford University, where she was provost before joining the Bush administration, in 2001, or the debate surrounding the University of California at Berkeley's continued employment of John C. Yoo, a law professor who, while on leave to work in the Justice Department, wrote the Bush administration's memos authorizing harsh interrogation techniques (The Chronicle, March 20).

Officials at Texas Tech are standing by their decision to offer Mr. Gonzales a one-year contract for $100,000 to teach a junior-level course on the executive branch, deliver guest lectures, and help recruit first-generation and minority students. The chancellor, Kent Hance, says having the former attorney general on campus "is going to be a great opportunity for these young people."

"We are in the business of ideas at the university," he says. A refusal to hire Mr. Gonzales on the basis of his views would have been "absurd."

Not every college is so willing to take such a stance.

Before going to Georgetown, Mr. Kissinger, a former secretary of state and national-security adviser, had tried to teach at Columbia University, which gave him an endowed chair. But he was so dogged by student protesters—who accused him of breaking the law in pursuing U.S. interests in Cambodia, Chile, and Vietnam—that he and Columbia abandoned the arrangement within weeks.

Walt Whitman Rostow, who had earned international acclaim as an economist, was a professor of economic history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before going to work for President John F. Kennedy, in 1961. Over the next several years, as a top national-security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, he generated ill will in academe as a prominent proponent of the Vietnam War. When he tried to return to academe, he was snubbed by MIT and had trouble landing a job. "It was obvious that the Eastern establishment was not eager to have him back," his daughter, Ann Rostow, recalls. He ended up taking a job as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Some students there initially objected, but he won many over by directly engaging them in debate, and went on to write 19 scholarly books and to be a well-regarded teacher.

Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, says his institution's political-science department has recruited former U.S. ambassadors to its faculty but "very, very carefully" examines their reputations before doing so. "You have to consider the implications of hiring somebody who is going to generate demonstrations and all that," he says.

Susan A. MacManus, a professor of public administration and political science at the University of South Florida at Tampa, observes that hiring controversial former officials is trickier for public colleges than private ones because of the potential backlash from state lawmakers, who set budgets. But she and other scholars of American politics say several trends in academe, including the proliferation of think tanks and academic centers and the growing share of faculty positions held by adjuncts without doctorates, have made it easier for politicians to land jobs on campuses.

If the hires that generate controversy tend to involve conservative Republicans, Ms. MacManus says, that is most likely a reflection of the liberal orientation of most college faculties. "Ideology matters," she says. Pepperdine University, a fairly conservative institution, encountered little internal resistance in naming as its law dean Kenneth W. Starr, the former special prosecutor who had made life miserable for President Bill Clinton.

Perhaps no other institution has employed as many controversial political figures as Georgetown. Along with Mr. Kissinger, its faculty has included Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who left teaching there to become ambassador to the United Nations under President Ronald Reagan and then returned; Douglas J. Feith, the former Pentagon undersecretary who played a major role in shaping President Bush's Iraq policy; and George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence caught up in the controversy over false claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Georgetown's provost, James J. O'Donnell, says that "if people are controversial, then they are controversial," but that he is not about to rule out people who are no more than accused of wrongdoing in a political setting.

"We certainly have high standards of ethical conduct that we impose on and expect of all of our faculty members," Mr. O'Donnell says. But at the same time, "we are interested in people who have something to bring in terms of experience in the wider world."

If there is a cautionary tale for colleges hiring high-profile political figures, it may be the story of how General Dwight D. Eisenhower emerged from World War II a national hero and then served with little distinction as president of Columbia University. People there did not like Ike, largely because they saw his appointment as politically motivated and did not regard him as an intellectual. In their view, he had committed one of academe's biggest sins: not being enough of an academic.

That misstep did not keep him from going on to become president of the United States.