Up until about a decade ago, most CS graduates from MIT were never taught C or Java in any class. They still seemed to do pretty well in the job market. (Mostly it was assumed that if you really liked software development, you would go out and learn one of those languages outside of class, such as from a student-led seminar.)
It's just a business thing. Some large local companies come and talk to the university and say that they need a bunch of CS grads to fit into their business. The HR drone says they need to know Java to be able to integrate into the company quickly. The lecturers get upset. The finance department gets promised a donation, the marketing department gets promised easy job searching for CS students. The ivory tower crumbles a bit and the lecturers teach Java.
Well yes it is easily explained by some love for java, why would that be so unlikely?
Computer Science is a diverse field, and not every CS professor considers mutable global variable an evil to be purged. (In fact, the majority of CS professors can't be bothered to think about such matter. They're busy tuning their neural networks, photorealistic simulation of snowflakes, improvements to TCP or whatever their particular research interest is. The answer to "Java or Haskell?" for them is "whatever that suits my need.")
Ah, yes, I remember those days (different university though). Our first class was programming in Pascal, and all subsequent programming classes were "deriving algorithms and proving them correct"-classes (a la Dijkstra). In other classes, like user interfaces, OO-programming, mathematics, computer systems, all kinds of projects, AI, and so on, the assignments had to be done in a particular language and it was up to us to learn it ourselves in addition to the classwork. So I had to learn and used java, c, c++, Delphi, PHP, prolog, bash, mathematica, matlab, haskell, ASM, python, and latex (although I could be forgetting some DSLs). It was fun though :-)
