It's not particularly surprising that there should be an above-average number of educationalists/academics (or just people with a historical bent) within the folk movement, because folk music (if by that term you mean the sort of songs/tunes collected by Child, Sharp, etc.) hasn't been the 'music of the people' since the late 19th or very early 20th C., and even then those 'people' tended to be in rural agricultural areas yet to catch up with the encroaching music hall fashions.

Despite any wishful talk of a 'living tradition', to continue to perform this material (if we talk of a largely static canon of 'traditional' repertoire that is mostly 100-300 years old) in the 21st century is a very consciously antiquarian, anachronistic pursuit (as is playing Bach, Mozart, etc. in the classical realm), usually defined *against* the electrified pop music to which the vast majority of the population listens. Of course, the urban, anachronistic folk revival has itself become a tradition, but it will continue to be a specialised one precisely because of its historicist bias.