I'm the instructor for the class (and author of the post). I'll try and clarify a few things here.
If anyone is interested in participating in the next version of the course (which starts Jan 14), please submit the form here: http://rust-class.org/pages/spring2014.html
- "Operating systems" vs. "Systems programming"
If your definition of an operating systems course is a course where you implement your own OS or hack on the Linux kernel, this wasn't an operating systems course. But, most people have a broader interpretation of operating systems courses today, to include courses where you learn about the layers between high-level programs and physical things, and about how to build robust, scalable, and secure computing systems. This is the second type of course. Deciding do a course that was not entirely focused on building an OS was not related to the choice of using Rust (I already knew I didn't want to do a build-an-OS course before thinking about which language to use), and I don't think its controversial (this is what the majority of top programs already do). I discuss more about this in the general course wrap-up: http://rust-class.org/pages/course-wrapup.html
- Eliminating "Race Conditions"
You are right in pointing out that Rust doesn't eliminate all race conditions (and no language that allows multiple threads and any interaction with the the external world really could do this). My wording here was very careless. What Rust does is use language/compiler mechanisms to eliminate the kinds of pernicious data races (multiple threads reading and writing the same mutable state in uncontrolled ways) that are a very common and hard to find and fix problems in most multi-threaded programs.
- C's assignment operator
My perhaps somewhat hyperbolic diatribe about C using ‘=‘ for assignment is meant to illustrate how design decisions C's designers made for good reasons given the computing systems they were using in the 1960/1970s, would not be the best decisions if one was designing a language from scratch today. I think the choice of ‘=‘ illustrates this well, but there are dozens of other more serious issues in C's design that were good or necessary choices in 1972, but are undesirable legacies today: not having bounds checking, not specifying the order of evaluation for many constructs, allowing arbitrary and unchecked type casting, unsafe memory management, etc. Other languages (including Rust) that are strongly influenced by C syntax have also adopted the ‘=‘ symbol for assignment, but that doesn’t make it a good thing. For languages like Rust that are targeting experienced programmers it is probably the right choice; for languages like Python that are intended as first languages, it is really unfortunate, and many smart people who might otherwise turn out to be talented programmers are unnecessarily put-off by this. (I don't have concrete data to support this, but from having over 350,000 students in my open intro CS course that uses Python, I have plenty of anecdotal experience with students being confused by this.)
Vocational value
This was a course at a public university, so its content should not be primarily driven by immediate vocational concerns. There's nothing wrong with vocational courses, where the primary goal of the course is to improve the immediate job prospects of students who take it, but was not and should not be the goal of courses at public universities. (That said, the students entering this class are already very well qualified for the job market, and many of the 4th years in the class already have job offers, so are not in danger of not being able to get an interesting job since they only have C experience from one previous course. Knowing Rust has actually been helpful for some students in the job market, and I don't think having less C experience is a major issue for many positions.)
From a purely pragmatic viewpoint, the majority of the costs of the course are not covered from student’s tuition, but are paid by the US and Virginia taxpayers. So, our main goal should be to do what we can to enable and encourage students to do things that make the world a better place (the best ways to do that, of course, are debatable, and maybe it is learning how to hack the Linux kernel, but I think that’s a much tougher argument to make.)