This is a step forward. I've been pushing for more language safety for what, decades, and it's good to see Stanford teaching it. It's important that students understand ownership concepts, because they exist in C, but the language doesn't give you any help in dealing with ownership. For years, I've been saying about C that the big questions are "how big is it?", "who deletes it?", and "who locks it?". Rust addresses all of those. So teaching Rust is useful to get students thinking in the right direction. Even if they get stuck maintaining old C code.
Looking ahead, new students are going to have to deal in future with huge numbers of CPU cores. So they need to deal with large numbers of threads. That's very hard to do well. This class addresses not just safety, but performance. That's good.
This is so far ahead of what I got from Stanford in 1985.
(I have some arguments with the Rust people, mostly around over-use of "unsafe" and too much language churn, but they're doing great work.)