If this is true, though, that's great news. SICP is the perfect way to teach computer science from the ground up, assuming that you're dealing with a student dedicated enough to do things the 'hard way' (or at least, the way that's less immediately/obviously rewarding at first). This is harder to do at other schools where students are not yet certain that they want to study CS, and there is a need to 'sell' them very quickly on the merits of learning CS (which is why you end up with some intro classes designed around mobile app development, rather than fundamental CS theory).