Personally I take a different view: learn a high-level language, use it to study computer science, and if you feel like writing some low-level code go ahead and learn C (though even then, you could probably do better by bootstrapping a compiler for your favorite high-level language and adding some extensions for low-level operations). C is not the best or even a particularly good language to try to learn abstract CS concepts with, professors who choose it are needlessly stressing out their students, and at the end of the day you can learn a lot more about algorithms and data structures when you are not busy worrying about pointers or trying to avoid the things that "everyone knows to avoid" (except people keep failing to do so).
I say this as someone who watched the catastrophic results of trying to use C++ as a language to teach data structures. It is far more important to be able to think abstractly than to know how to deal with pointers.
I say this as someone who watched the catastrophic results of trying to use C++ as a language to teach data structures. It is far more important to be able to think abstractly than to know how to deal with pointers.