At my undergrad I felt like I was expected to side with my professors in their worship of Chomsky. Also, my general experience is that Chomsky is a lightning rod for the more polemic aspects of the field, he loves to make sweeping dismissals of entire subfields, which then encourages people to take sides.
In grad school, in syntax and historical we do go through concepts by reading specific papers written by Famous People in the field, but we also deconstruct those papers. It's not so much "you need to read Pollock to understand the cartographic approach to syntax" as "here's a bunch of evidence Pollock found to suggest we need more fine-grained projections". And more than one of the profs has explicitly told us that part of the reason we're learning by reading the primary literature rather than decontextualised versions is because we need to learn how to read and analyse academic papers if we want to be able to do our own research.
I would also note that the primary difference between linguistics and modern physics is that in modern physics there's a correct answer to teach, while in linguistics most areas haven't yet been settled. Instead there are a lot of different theories with different areas of explanatory coverage and no unifying theory that works yet. It's the kind of situation that fosters Blue/Green partisanship and I would expect that to persist until someone comes up with a theory that's more obviously correct than the current offerings.
There isn't a correct answer to teach in Modern Physics, either. (Well, there is, but just like in linguistics, it's not agreed upon as to what it is.) You have controversy over things like what interpretation of quantum mechanics to take, or whether string theory is a load of nonsense, or whatever.
It struck me this morning that a key feature that distinguishes art from science is that art is studied in the context of the artist, while science is not. When you learn calculus, mechanics, or optics, you don't read Newton. Science has content that can be abstracted out of one context - including the context of its creation - and studied and used in other contexts. This is a defining characteristic. Whereas art can't be easily removed from its context - one could argue art is context. When we study art, we study the original work by a single artist, to get that artist's vision.
(This isn't a defining characteristic of art - it wasn't true until the twelfth century, when writers and artists began signing their works. In ancient Greece, through the Middle Ages in Europe, the content, subject, or purpose of art was considered primary, in the same way that the content of science is today. "Homer's" Iliad was a collaborative project, in which many authors (presumably) agreed that the story was the important thing, not one author's vision of it, and (also presumably) added to it in much the way that science is cumulative today. Medieval art generally glorified the church or the state.)
However, because this is the way western society views art today, we can use this as a test. Is it art or science? Well, is its teaching organized around the creators, or around the content?
Philosophy and linguistics are somewhere between art and science by this test. So is symbolic AI, while data mining is pure science.