Guest is so hostile to the university as a concept one can only assume he or she had a traumatic experience. His (or her) description of a university bears no resemblance to any environment I've ever seen. I both study and teach at a university, as well as being a folk enthusiast, and this description sounds about as accurate to me as saying "folk music enthusiasts are stuffy old blighters with their heads up their arses." SOME are, just as some professors and some schools might match Guest's description. But it's a singularly uninformed approach to suggest they all are.

I would have to say, given the effects of similar folk music programmes in other countries (say, Sibelius Academe in Finland), that this will be good for the music. To put an enthusiastic group of young people into the hands of Aly Anderson and Karen Tweed et al for a few years and then turn them loose on the world seems to me to be a great idea. And, several of Finland's top folk bands were formed at Sibelius, which has proved to be a great place for young, talented folk musicians to interact with each other at length and create together.

How can this be bad?