I remember taking a graduate level networking course at NYU in the early 1990s. The instructor was an IBM consultant. We studied token ring, FDDI, SNA, HDLC/SDLC and several other commercial products.

One evening, I raised my hand and asked when we were going to study TCP/IP.

He simply quipped, "TCP/IP is not a real networking protocol."

So I wouldn't say that universities are always behind the curve :)