Well yes it is easily explained by some love for java, why would that be so unlikely?
Computer Science is a diverse field, and not every CS professor considers mutable global variable an evil to be purged. (In fact, the majority of CS professors can't be bothered to think about such matter. They're busy tuning their neural networks, photorealistic simulation of snowflakes, improvements to TCP or whatever their particular research interest is. The answer to "Java or Haskell?" for them is "whatever that suits my need.")