Good time Charlie, the hard-drinking, skirt-chasing Texan politician played by Tom Hanks in the film Charlie Wilson’s War, is facing a new battle.

Plans to endow a Charlie Wilson chair in Pakistan studies at the University of Texas have riled the college’s liberal academics, who feel he is too “gung-ho” to be a role model for students.

They say Wilson’s support for Afghans fighting Soviet occupiers during the 1980s, when he covertly funnelled American government aid to the mujaheddin, led to the rise of the Taliban and its allies in al-Qaeda. “ It is outrageous,” said Dana Cloud, professor of communications at the university. “I thought it was a joke.”

Cloud, who is spearheading a global online petition against the chair, said that if the university did not abandon the plan, she would organise demonstrations by professors with placards. “A Charlie Wilson chair brings our university into ridicule,” she said. “I do not know one serious scholar who would take such a post.”

The university is pressing ahead with the creation of the chair, employing fundraisers to collect $500,000 from wealthy Texans who still regard Good Time Charlie with a mixture of affection and trepidation.

A matching contribution to fund a lecturer and guest-lectures by Wilson himself has been put up by a local charity in Lufkin, east Texas.

This is where Wilson, 75, lives with his younger wife Barbara Alberstadt, a former ballerina he met at a Washington cocktail party. She is the latest of a steady stream of “Charlie’s Angels”, former assistants known for beauty as well as brains.

Wilson has not seen the petition from 12 University of Texas academics but according to friends, he is “surprised and mildly shocked, as well as amused” by the censorious attitude of the “sniffy” academics.

Reinvigorated by a recent heart transplant, Wilson rejects charges that his proxy war was responsible for the rise of the Taliban.

“We were fighting the Russian evil empire, supplying its enemies like we did when we aided the Soviets against Hitler. Anyway, who the hell had heard of the Taliban then? They did not exist – the fighters were our friends,” he said.

“Our mistake was [messing] up the endgame after the war, not making sure they all had jobs after the Soviets left in 1989. Something we must not do when we pull out of Iraq.”

Despite his ebullience, Wilson remains sensitive to links between his war and terrorism today. He and his former fiancée, the conservative activist Joanne Herring, played on screen by Julia Roberts, persuaded film-makers to cut a final scene showing the attack on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. “It was unfair – none of the weapons we delivered were ever used against us,” said Herring last year.

However, Wilson said the film, if anything, played down his unlikely career. “I had the most fun of my life making that movie and believe me, I have had a lot of fun in my life.”

During the 1960s the tall lanky “liberal from Lufkin” turned his womanising ways into a political asset, saying that Texans knew they were not voting for a “constipated monk”. He might have remained an undistinguished national congressman if Herring, during their brief engagement, had not persuaded him to visit camps in Pakistan full of Afghan refugees displaced by the 1979 Soviet invasion. He became a crusader in Washington, raising huge sums for the CIA to arm the Afghans.

Wilson remains politically active and feels the US should pull out of Iraq next year. Although he was at the US Naval Academy with John McCain, he cannot support him: “I love him and wish him well, but not in November.”

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