It's all over the art departments I've seen.

Flash is ubiquitous in animation-focused tracks. While lower-level tools are necessary for studio-quality productions, I still don't know anything that even comes close to flash for prototypes and low to mid-level animation work.

What does your university use?

If Flash dies, what will people use to prototype? It's used in UX testing everywhere I've looked. It's invaluable for quickly creating animated interactive prototypes. Flash is not just obnoxious websites and banner ads.

IMO Flash is a great tool to develop a familiarity with certain useful concepts including frame based animation, tweening, basic programming and even OOP.

What is odd about that?

It seems too specific a technology to learn in school. Time in that class might be better spent in a more fundamental area.

In most programs the point wouldn't be to teach the specific technology, but to teach something like "interactive media design/programming", or variations on that. To keep things manageable, though, often courses will pick one environment for the examples/project to be in. Flash is a common choice; HTML5 and Processing are also used semi-regularly. Courses catering more for CS majors might use something lower-level like raw DirectX or OpenGL (possibly via a wrapper like Glut or SDL). You typically can't avoid choosing some technology, whether it's Flash or OpenGL, even if the point of the course isn't specifically to teach that technology's API and quirks.