I was avoiding this thread because these "future of folk" ones invariably turn into shouting matches, but, eh:

Who is missing the point, it isn't the study of Folklore that is being knocked it is the attitude that seems to be imbued in some graduates that they are the crème de la crème and they can piss in the faces of the paying public by deigning to turn up and produce mediocrity when they should be capable of more.

This is not a problem peculiar to folk music, though. It happens in all areas of study. My brother is in graduate school in conflict archaeology (he wants to study how war affects civilian populations) and he runs into this attitude all the time with anthropologists who are long on theory and short on shared experience with the people they studied.

Hell, I ran into the same thing in college when I took a Civil War & Reconstruction class (that's U.S. Civil War, 1861-1865) from a Yale/Princeton Yankee whose Ph.D. was on the colonial history of Georgia. However, the schmuck would never have deigned to actually live in the South, and consequently kept asking obnoxious questions of his handful of Southern students. Stuff he ought to have been explaining to us, had he ever been in a "cultural immersion" situation. Furthermore, he should have realized that the fact that we were even attending a very left-wing liberal arts college in the Midwest was an major indicator that we were not the best examples of Southern attitude toward the war. Duh.

I have not seen the curriculum (is there a website? Can somebody PM it to me?), but I don't see anything wrong with studying folk music any more than there's anything wrong with people studying other cultures, men doing Women's Studies, etc. I do think that there's only so much one can learn in the classroom before one has to jump in and live it, but any adequate, non ego-bloated professor should take that into account.