a) Makes no difference to the argument. I'm not criticizing the student for writing to Feynman. I'm just saying that Feynman was absolutely right in his criticism, considering how elementary the subject matter is.

b) Also doesn't make any difference. I'm familiar enough with W&M to know that (i) it has a full-fledged graduate program and (ii) professors there collaborate extensively with JLab in both theory and experiment, though I admit that I don't know if that was the case when this student wrote the letter.