Personally, I think that those who are bent toward doing evil with their programming knowledge will do so with or without a class being taught. The information is out there.

I also think that books like Hacking Exposed, Hack Attacks Revealed, Counter Hack and the like are essentially based on the concept that to be a good security administrator it helps to know exactly how the hackers/crackers are attacking in the first place.

It seems logical on those same lines that learning advanced virus-writing techniques may prove valuable in defending against those same techniques or even possibly coming up with the next generation AV software that will protect better. The current virus-signature based protection can only go on so long. What happens in a year? 5 years? 10 years- when the number of viruses and worms grows exponentially and the signature/footprint database is 150Mb? There has to be another way to catch and block these threats other than signatures.

I also think that by knowing exactly how the viruses and worms work it may be more possible to create the vaccine or anti-worm that could be unleashed on the Internet to eradicate and counteract these threats (although counter-hacking is still a controversial topic of ethics and legality).

AVIEN / EWS of which I am a member has issued a press release strongly advising against this class or teaching this sort of material. Here is an article about this topic: Article