Still a month from his first game as Stanford’s football coach, Jim Harbaugh has found a way to keep himself and a program coming off its worst season in 46 years in national headlines.

Comments Harbaugh made this spring about Michigan’s academic requirements for football players have sparked a firestorm of controversy at his alma mater, five months after the coach tangled with USC.

Michigan ripped into its former star quarterback this week, essentially calling him a traitor. “He’s not a Michigan man,” tailback Mike Hart was quoted as saying in Thursday’s Detroit News. “I wish he had never played here. But it is what it is.”

Harbaugh declined to address the situation Thursday through an athletic department spokesman. Stanford athletic director Bob Bowlsby was traveling and didn’t respond to e-mail.

Harbaugh, who played 15 seasons in the NFL, first got into hot water with USC in March when he said 2007 would be Coach Pete Carroll’s final season at the school. Harbaugh also has questioned Cal’s admissions standards.

The latest controversy started when Harbaugh, who was hired from the University of San Diego in December, told the San Francisco Examiner in May that Michigan lowers its admissions standards for football players and advises them to take easy classes.

Harbaugh made his comments in defense of his new employer.

“College football needs Stanford,” Harbaugh told the Examiner. “We’re looking not for student-athletes, but scholar-athletes. No other school can carry this banner. The Ivy League schools don’t have enough weight. Other schools which have good academic reputations have ways to get borderline athletes in and keep them in.”

A week later, Harbaugh told the Ann Arbor (Mich.) News, “I would use myself as an example. I came in there, wanted to be a history major, and I was told early on in my freshman year that I shouldn’t be, that it takes too much time, too much reading, that I shouldn’t be a history major and play football.”

Speaking at the Big Ten Conference kickoff Wednesday, Michigan Coach Lloyd Carr said of Harbaugh’s comments, “Do I think they’re elitist? Yeah. Arrogant? Yes. Self-serving? Yes.”

Harbaugh’s remarks not only touched a nerve with the current Michigan team, but also with at least one of Harbaugh’s former teammates.

Jamie Morris, a tailback during the Harbaugh years, told the Detroit News that the comments have ended his friendship with the quarterback who was named the Big Ten’s player of the year in 1986 and was 21-3-1 in his final two seasons with the Wolverines.

Not everyone is throwing stones at Harbaugh, who received a bachelor’s degree in communications from Michigan in 1986.

“Jim does say some provocative things,” Bowlsby told the San Mercury Mercury News last month. “I haven’t seen him say them without thinking about what he’s saying. He’s not a loose cannon.”

In a column in May, the Ann Arbor News’ Jim Carty raised this question: “When Jim Harbaugh, a man who played here and makes a living in college football, is willing to burn down one of the most important bridges in his life to make the point Michigan can do a better job balancing football with academics, it’s impossible not to ask whether he might be right.”