Yes but I don't even remember being told it existed. My intro to C professor made sure we knew that Vi and Emacs existed and gave us enough information to be interested in learning more; why not gdb? My guess is he probably didn't use it.
Yeah we didn't touch any debuggers, I think to an extent they were more just worried about people learning some language basics. The downside of having a first year c/c++ course that didn't just have comp sci students.
The other thing our uni was bad for is that they encouraged us to use vim through the uni servers early on but never have us a proper overview or the resources to really learn it. As a result most saw it as a handicapped text editor that just made things harder.
