It really depends on the school you attend. The CS program at my school was very theory heavy, and light on programming. The entire department used (and still uses) C because you can use it for every class and every professor knew it. I think from a computer science perspective, C was preferred because you have very low-level control and it is a very verbose language where everything is performed explicitly.
Interesting. My college used a lot of Python for nearly all the classes except for language seminars and some parts of other classes.
I asked my professors why and they argued that Python "doesn't get in the way" (static typing, compilation etc.) allowing us to focus more on learning the algorithms and theory.
I think I'd prefer to use Python in most cases. My data structures class was taught by a professor who LOVED a ten year old book. Unfortunately, more than half of the assignments in the book wouldn't compile with GCC. Everyone I know who took that class said it was the hardest class they took in college because you basically had to rewrite every program from scratch.
I still preferred C to Java. I'm sure Python would have made that class way easier, though I do love pointers.
