It is my impression that it's exactly the other way round: it's popular with universities precisely because it's popular in the industry. Many professors would

It is my impression that it's exactly the other way round: it's popular with universities precisely because it's popular in the industry. Many professors would like to teach something much purer (Smalltalk or Eiffel for OO, Lisp or Haskell for functional programming), but they also often have trouble forming a consensus on any of those. So it's easy to give in to the pressure from the industry, and simply teach Java.