The Newest Rock-Star Professors Are … Rock Stars

Every semester they arrive on college campuses: authors, actors, down-on-their-luck politicians, and aging musicians. They are celebrity guest lecturers, and while they are ballyhooed for their life experiences, their star appeal is what got them in the door.

This fall’s crop includes two classic rockers, a retired four-star general, a former South American leader, and an author:

* Todd Rundgren, the rock star and producer best known for his hit “Hello It’s Me,” will teach half of a two-week honors seminar at Indiana University. Mr. Rundgren will teach alongside an IU music professor, Glenn Gass, who met the musician while on sabbatical in Hawaii, according to a press release from the university.

“The kids start taking the bus together and the next thing you know, you’re going to cookouts at Todd’s,” Mr. Gass says in the release. “I quickly learned that everything they said about him was true. He’s brilliant, articulate, really interesting — and interested in things far beyond his own work and even his music. He’s just a really engaged human being.”

(Tim Brown)

* Steve Miller, the rock musician who churned out such platinum-selling singles as “The Joker” and “Fly Like an Eagle,” is an artist in residence this year at the University of Southern California. He is teaching undergraduate music students and working with student bands.  A press release from USC notes that among his many achievements, Mr. Miller sold more than 30 million albums and introduced the phrase “pompitus of love” to the English lexicon.

* U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, retired, is teaching a graduate seminar this fall in Yale University’s master’s program in international relations, the university reports. General McChrystal was fired at the start of the summer from his gig as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan after Rolling Stone magazine reported disparaging comments he made about members of the Obama administration.

* When Álvaro Uribe, the former president of Colombia, was hired as a distinguished scholar in Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, protesters attacked his human-rights record and said he was not fit to teach at the university. On Monday night, according to the student blog Vox Populi, the police forcibly removed and arrested a protester who began yelling at Mr. Uribe during a class in a campus auditorium. The Georgetown Voice, a student newspaper, asked Mr. Uribe about his human-rights record in an interview posted on Thursday. 

* Mark Bowden, the journalist whose series of articles for the Philadelphia Inquirer about the 1993 battle for Mogadishu, Somalia, became the book and film Blackhawk Down, is an adjunct faculty member this year at the University of Delaware. The university says Mr. Bowden is teaching a course called “Telling True Stories” this fall and will lead an undergraduate seminar on reporting and writing in the spring.

What other celebrities have joined the professoriate this fall? Let us know in the comments.