Yes there was. Java’s adoption itself was largely a result of corporate fashion and was brought into university and high school curricula to meet their needs. Fashion has always been part of the industry in some way.
Java was a very plausible language for teaching software development at the time. It had memory safety, good multithreading support, static typing, exceptions with some static checking, and supported OO. The sandboxing and VM was also appealing, for tools support and research.
OO was very popular, and not just for fashion: (1) academia was concerned with things like interacting objects as models of computation; and (2) OO methodologies of the time were very useful tool for practical reasoning about systems designs, and Java arguably supported mapping design models to code better than any non-research language of the time (though there's still a gap).
I was involved with a university CS department effort to learn about and evaluate many OO languages, for rethinking intro CS education, and I recall Java did very well. This was before most companies other than Sun had ever heard of Java, so I'm not aware of any employer push at that time.
Turning exciting Java (which initially seemed targeted at the kind of programming work then using C++, not corporate MIS programmers using 4GL frameworks and such) into a bureaucratic enterprise language, came later.
Regarding pre-corporate university interest in Java, I can mainly tell you what I recall, but you can still see this 1996 Emacs mode for writing in an assembly language for the JVM (like a student might go to the trouble to spend time on, if Java had research target appeal): https://www.neilvandyke.org/jasmin-emacs/
In 2004, Java had been out for nearly a decade and was Java 5 at that point with the collections framework maturing the standard library.
At that point, Java had just as much maturity as Go (2009 release) or Powershell (2006 release) does now.
Java is only three years younger than Python. It would be surprising to see people claim that programming python in 2001 was done because it was fashionable.
