Johnny Marr is a textbook definition of a “busy working musician”. Currently in New Zealand, recording with Neil Finn, the former Smiths guitarist flies back at the end of the month and heads straight into the studio with the Cribs. And, somehow, he must also find time to plan his next lecture to the students on the popular-musicology degree course at the University of Salford.

Visiting professor Marr knows the pressure is on. His inaugural lecture, Always from the Outside: Mavericks, Innovators and Building Your Own Ark, delivered last November, drew more than 1,000 people to the campus. Together with the workshop he ran for the students, it garnered him more column inches than all of his recent musical projects combined.

It wasn’t just that Marr had apparently “turned to the dark side”, as one blogger put it, that proved so controversial. It is his belief that teaching is the way forward. “One interviewer said to me, ‘Isn’t it a contradiction in terms to come to university to learn how to be a rocker?’ That’s such an outdated, old-fashioned paradigm. To them, true ‘rockers’ are supposed to be hanging about on the streets in leather jackets, throwing bricks through windows. It’s a cliché. We’ve grown and moved on a long way.

“I don’t see anything wrong in education in any creative sphere, as long as it’s not to the detriment of the emotion. What I do know is that if, when I was 16, someone had told me there was a building with a ton of amps in it, musicians hanging about and loads of resources, I’d have walked 10 miles every day to get there.”

Marr is just one of the high-profile musicians and music- industry professionals who have heeded the siren call of academia. From the grandaddy of multimedia pop theory, Brian Eno (whose debut lecture involved a demonstration of how he once took a pee in the surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp’s infamous urinal, using a length of surgical hose), to Jarvis Cocker (whose Saying the Unsayable lecture on pop lyrics found its way into his live shows), the great education divide is finally being crossed. The Hacienda DJ Dave Haslam, George Martin, the Blur bassist Alex James and the poet-singer Patti Smith are among the big names turning years of experience into student-friendly “edutainment”.

Sussex, Plymouth, Glasgow and Goldsmiths universities all offer degree courses in pop. You can study everything from modern commercial songwriting, music management and scoring for television to DJ studies, “shred” guitar, the Jewish contribution to rock and the sociology of the Beatles. Entering the 2009 Ucas season, there are 450 degree and diploma courses available — there were just 40 in 2000. New campuses and purpose-built music and media schools are popping up all over the country.

The reasons for this cosying-up between pop and academia are easy enough to understand. Considered cultural fluff for many years, pop finally triumphed as the dominant musical form of the late 20th century. Fifty years on from Awopbopaloobop, it might almost be recognised as a musical epoch alongside classical, baroque and early music. Pop has history, influence and, like literature, a recognised canon.

Richard Parfitt, a lecturer at the Brighton Institute of Modern Music (BIMM), was the singer with the 60ft Dolls, discovered Duffy and has written a number of songs for her. “Modern classics are still being made, but the golden age of rock is over,” he says. “I’m not saying all of pop’s past is worth studying — 99% of novels aren’t worth it — but it’s important to acknowledge the canon. Astral Weeks, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Forever Changes and Marquee Moon are as worthy of scrutiny as the Ancient Mariner or The Waste Land. It’s not about liking them. It’s about knowing their context so you can salvage and reinvent.”

Marr agrees: “There are rules. You learn them quickly — and then you set about breaking them with confidence.”

The signs of the growing intellectualisation of pop are easy enough to spot. The rock hacks of yore can take a good deal of credit. Nick Kent, Dave Marsh, Jon Savage, Simon Reynolds, Greil Marcus and their ilk gave pop a quasi-intellectual gravitas. Pop became a matter of competing orthodoxies: the Stooges v Genesis, the countercultural importance of Pet Shop Boys, casuals, new romantics and grunge. Successive generations, weaned on Radio 1, evolved a shared cultural history. And once the broadsheets started writing seriously about pop in the late 1980s, the slow walk in from the wastelands of “lowbrow” culture began in earnest.

Joe Stretch, singer with the newly signed Manchester band (We Are) Performance, is also a lecturer in modern literature and the pop lyric at Keele. He maintains that universities have a new role as guardians of pop: “MySpace has blown it for pop. You've got 8m people uploading music that is largely slapstick and cliché-ridden. The critic in us will always look for new ways to filter culture. Universities are the new gatekeepers. Learning the history and context of pop is essential, because that’s part of how music is judged and how it evolves.”

So, let’s cut to the chase. Is a degree in glam-rock studies actually any use? The answer, it seems, is yes. The industry is building new links with education. Sony BMG, Universal and agents such as William Morris now run graduate programmes. A relevant “bit of paper” is essential. John Sweeney, business manager at the School of Media, Music & Performance at Salford, says: “Twenty years ago, these kinds of courses were ridiculed as Mickey Mouse degrees by the academic establishment. Now we are ahead of Oxford in the rankings in media, communications and popular music, because they do not offer purpose-built degrees that the industry values as highly.

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