It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s the New York Times Magazine’s annual College Issue, all shiny and new and ready to be inhaled by the uptight parents of upper-middle-class teenagers everywhere, if not by actual college students, because seriously, if I have to read another sentence about how much my generation loves iPod Touch, I’ll vomit down the front of my best college-logo-bearing hooded sweatshirt.

But wait! Amid the usual modicum of features about web-savvy young folk, racist academics, and OMGBarackObama emerges the snobbiest (most glorious?) fashion spread of our time, featuring overeducated silver foxes lounging on leather upholstery in snifter-filled East Coast libraries: “Class Acts: These teachers make academia look good.” Check out Class Act #1: Penn professor Wendy Steiner, draped in Gucci, Peter Som, and Dries van Noten furs:

Steiner has recently taken a scholarly interest in the fashion model, whom she sees “as a reality morphing into images and representations, like so much else in contemporary life, even professors. But I’m wearing clothes that no professor would dare wear in the classroom.”

What, chinchilla pelt doesn’t go with the yellow glare of overhead projector? On a different note: Those are some nice legs for someone who has been in academia for over thirty years. More teacher-hotties modeling fashions expensive enough to rival your tuition, after the jump.

Gravity has been kind to Harvard physics professor Lisa Randall:

For Randall, a professor of physics at Harvard known for her ability to translate abstract subject matter like cosmological inflation to the masses, it’s important for students to see her dressed in more than just a lab coat. “I hope that seeing professors not all fitting a single stereotype will encourage students to keep an open mind.”

Sadly, NYTMag’s styling crew was not so kind to Brown biology professor Ken Miller who got stuck modeling an acid-washed lab coat blasted with cobwebs:

A professor of biology at Brown University, Miller is known to liven up clinical subject matter with sports analogies and even music. But fashion, not so much. “My students so seldom see me wearing a tie that when they do, they stop me on the street and ask what the special occasion might be.”

Finally, Columbia anthropology professor Michael Taussig is avuncular in that hot-uncle-you-secretly-want-to-do way:

Mr. Rogers meets Karl Lagerfeld, in strappy man-sandals!

A professor of anthropology at Columbia University, Taussig says his job is an exercise in “cross fertilizing” ideas among science, art, storytelling and criticism. “It’s ultimately impossible to collapse these distinctions,” he says. “But I try.”

Ooh, Professor Taussig, you can cross fertilize with us anytime.