I think his claim is based on the belief that Java has no academic merit (in the context of the other languages he mentioned) - it's just useful for development.
One step further: If you think that learning a specific language in university is going to get you a job you are not studying computer science, you should be going to a trade school.
A cs degree is universal, it should be language agnostic.
One computer language or another, it doesn't matter one bit, they're all functionally equivalent. Just like a chef cook has 30 knives to choose from you have a palette of languages that you could choose from to solve a given problem.
If you really understand computers then the languages are just a means to an end.
I disagree with your statement that choice of language "doesn't matter one bit." Some languages are better at some tasks than others. Appealing to functional equivalence ignores the relative cost (in time and characters typed) of expressing the same idea in different languages.
I suspect you're abusing the term "theoretical computer science," which is surprisingly common in this crowd. I assume you actually mean basic computer science concepts relevant to programming.
To address your question, Java abstracts away memory management - not just dynamic memory allocation, but common off-by-one mistakes will result in a runtime exception. It's possible, but unlikely, that you'll get a segfault in C. You probably own the memory just past your array, and you're more likely to get strange errors because you're invisibly overwriting values.
If you want to focus on algorithmic thinking, and not the realities of a computer, this is a win. As another posted pointed out above, I think other languages are better suited for this, but Java is still valid.
