I have to say, UC Irvine (the school discussed in the article) isn't really a Java school. Introductory students are taught Scheme, and the required curriculum includes language design, algorithms, and operating systems. Optional courses that I took included cryptography, computer graphics, computational geometry, and artificial intelligence. Some of these classes used Java, others didn't.

That being said, the threshold for just passing the classes never seemed very high. The education was there if you wanted it, but most students didn't seem to, and were happy to get by with a barely passing grade. This is obviously a problem, but different from the one discussed in the Spolsky article.