Most classes have to teach the subject and how to program. Programming is beginning to be an essential skills so they have to choose a language to teach. Also

Most classes have to teach the subject and how to program. Programming is beginning to be an essential skills so they have to choose a language to teach. Also those classes that chose R, from my experiences, are non CS classes, the professor are from other discipline. They just want a tool that solve their need quick. An example is the Princeton's Stat class, the professor is a humanity major. The class gave us tons of data and we had to do ANOVA and such and we needed a computer to crunch so number can't do by hand. So he chose R which he uses a lot.