"I suggested Smalltalk at one of the meetings, based on discussions here, and got a set of disgusted/confused looks."

What you saw was fear and ignorance.

Of course if you're a vocational school then sure, teach whatever the want ads mention.

If you're a university, then you're ripping off the students.

(Yeah, I've seen the same crap at UCD where a friend of mine teaches the RDBMS class, something about "relevance" and commercial application they keep mentioning as they decide to teach algorithms in java, now everyone struggles to get their classpath exactly right).