I'm not convinced. I want to see Rust as First Language attempted by somebody good. The staff who taught me the Standard ML of New Jersey are retired, and the current programme head is a friend who disagrees with me strongly about how this entire discipline should be approached, but in principle I feel it ought to be interesting & might be extremely productive for the cohort.

I think worst case it's a "sink or swim" course where a large fraction of the cohort wash out and that's bad for numbers (which will annoy bean counter but for a prestige university might actually be OK medium term) and best case the wash out rates are no different but the good students are receiving a lot more value than for today's First Language which is (at the university I'm thinking of) Python.

I think the move assignment semantic and the use of "const" to mean constant are examples of things where Rust is significantly penalized by having older languages teach their insane choices as just "How it is" so that then later a Rust course needs to have students un-learn this stuff when it would be easier to begin there.