I think academics got a bad rap because of institutional reasons.
Unlike in European universities, American professors are required to
publish fairly often, and much of what is published fits the stereotype
of academic prose.  Cant heavy, dependent on theories the subtleties of
which none but the professionals have time to absorb, and oftentimes
masquerading as "radical" or "subversive" thanks to the bizarre
conflation of criticism and politics that is now de rigueur, American
academic arguments propped up and made to look sophisticated and
probing only serve to distance research interests from teaching
interests, and to ignore public interest in the interests of
publication.  The French thinkers whose work is rampaged in order for
this tenure mill to continue rolling were not themselves ambitious
academics, but were for the most part outsiders to the Sorbonne
establishment.  Hence the fact that Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, et al.
did not footnote heavily, and certainly did not do so enough to have
succeeded in the America milieu.

The patience of the French theorists, who published on popular presses
and who gave lectures, became transmuted into a series of English
key-words without which one will never see one's work in Critical
Theory and the like: discourse, differance (sic), archaeology,
"always-already", "the-subject-who-is-supposed-to-know", hegemony,
ideology, agency, subject of enunciation, synchronic vs. diachronic,
and an expansive use of the word "desire" are all variously prescribed
for frequent usage, and are all used, over and over and over, across
all the ramified categories and combinations of post-colonial,
post-industrial, late-capitalist, post-patriarchal, multi-queer,
post-racial identities, as if the translated French terms possessed
unswervable analytic force.  In reality, of course, they are used as a
series of passwords in the airlock passages of job security.  They are
therefore my friends, in that I'm nearly finished with my graduate
training, and must be prepared to act accordingly.  "Passing as
academics", one of my colleagues calls it.

This is why academics are resented, rather as are lawyers.  The job
demands imposture as much as it requires trained skill.  Fakery, in
these professions, is the foundation of learning.  Academics, even
worse than lawyers, have barely any utilitarian value at all, at least
in the public eye, and get their summers off taboot.  They say things
they can't mean, they hold opinions that they can't support to anyone
who doesn't already hold them as well, they are apt to act as though
they understand "culture" in a way that others cannot, and they
complicate self-evident realities, such as "bodies", one suspects,
because they have nothing significant to report and must write a
respectable paper before the summer session begins.

"Elitism", bandied about often enough in these so-called pages, is a
charge that compresses much of this: the fakery, the alienating ideas,
the self-assurance about one's permanent position, all resonates with
traditional American disdain for the posturing of elites.
Anti-intellectualism has a democratic streak in it, and I'm not sure
that it's always a bad thing.  And Pound disdained the apoetic
sophistry of the philologists upon whose backs he nonetheless stood.
What suddenly interests me is the way that "elitism" is often
considered first and foremost as a "cultural" quality, rather than an
economic one: we don't accuse Bill Gates of elitism, partially for his
charity, partially for his (arguably) democratizing technology, but
most especially because of his poor hair cut.  We certainly don't
accuse George W. Butch of being elitist -- the chief accomplishment of
his campaign was accentuating Gore's supposedly booksmart, know-it-all
woodenness --  and we have no problem considering the Gabor sisters to
be just about as elitist as they come, though they have nothing like
the Butchs' dynastic fortune.

So eggheads appear to strike unearned and unentertaining elitist
postures when they think there's something wrong with the way we dress
baby girls and boys, or the way that we ask immediately if a newborn is
a boy or a girl.  They paddle upstream in the river of cultural logic,
and are often buffetted backwards for it.  They sputter nonsense more
often than emitting intelligence, and appear hopelessly lost in their
own webbed rigging.  They capsize and don't even realize it, won't even
admit it, so vigorously do they deny the common sense of the commonly
sensible.  They are heroic, but undirected, and spurred by want and
desire much more so than by a search for truth, which they prudently
deny exists as a goal to be sought.

Very few of my colleagues have read Pound, and those that have are
students of the period generally speaking.  He is daunting, especially
in a professional setting where explication is done rarely and only
with suspicious circumspection; the modern poetry class I took during
my coursework was much more likely to discuss Pound as an impresario,
as a director of a particular "field of restricted production", as we
were to parse the content of the myths in Canto IV.  It's hard to say
which angle is more interesting, the top-down, seeing-the-forest
approach, or the bottom-up, seeing-the-trees one, since both have
distinct intellectual merits, but it still amazes me what poor readers
of poetry some of my colleagues were, and how little was done to
improve the situation.

Everything I've read by and about Pound, and that's not much, has been
on my own, in studying for my comprehensive exams.  And that might
ultimately be much better.  My Modern Poetry professor is fully
capable, and a formidable interpreter of "dark" texts, but my
classmates often were not.  They were too busy scrambling to piece
together a quasi-political foundation for slaying their own particular
conventional dragon to see the poems in action.

That's my $1.25, and I hope you didn't mind hearing me vent about my
professional context.

Cheers,
Jon