I'm a grad student and a Sessional Lecturer (Canadian equivalent of Adjunct Professor), and the Surface has completely replaced my laptop. My one piece of advice would be to go for the type cover. When typing fairly lengthy documents it makes a huge difference.
To help with any worries, I've tested the Surface with a variety of content delivery services (Desire2Learn, Courselink, WebCT) and it works fine. You might run into an issue if your campus requires using a client to connect to its wireless network (like the craptacular Cisco Clean Access Agent, as mine does). Obviously you won't be able to install this on your Surface. This shouldn't be a problem though, because most campuses have an unsecured option as well.
Feel free to PM me if you have any questions about how the Surface works in an academic setting. I tested it extensively when I first got it to make sure that it suited my needs.