Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python (2009)

Isn't this just part of the broader trend of CS departments switching away from teaching computer science to teaching computer engineering, which in turn is part of the more general trend of colleges becoming more vocational?

LISP dialects like Scheme are excellent for teaching pure computer science because they are the closest thing to executing lambda calculus expressions. Whereas Python is excellent for teaching applied computer engineering, because it's essentially executable pseudocode for imperative languages, and imperative languages are the most common language a computer engineer encounters in the real world.

Colleges becoming more vocational is a consequence of colleges becoming more expensive for students. If you are paying all of that money for college, you better get a good job out of it. I don't see that as a bad thing necessarily, but it would definitely be nice if we had better paths for those who want to end up in research.

I'd argue that SML (or derivative thereof) would make for a better teaching language, for both the lambda calculus aspect and the type theory aspect.