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I'd venture to say that my own vocabulary is much larger than your average English Literature Prof specifically because the vast majority of what I read is very old. But having a large and old vocabulary, and purposely using it to show how many words you know that others do not, are very different things, and I believe that describes most of the modern LF writers.
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The thing that amazes me is the attribution of base ethical motives purely because of the
style and diction of the writer, which is exactly how fascists in the 30s framed the intentions of writers like Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil, Stefan Zweig, Bertolt Brecht and Robert Desnos, and Stalin did Khlebnikov and Osip Mandelstam.
I would also ask that people stop generalizing about what English lit professors have and haven't read until they actually interact with a few in present time. It's easy to make generalizations until you're face to face with a member of the group you've just been mischaracterizing. Dean of Lit Robert Coover at Brown, for example, who was incredibly well-read in every century. He was also saintly in his support of younger writers (as well as gleeful in his duties: when I visited Brown one summer, the man actually came to my room personally, woke me up with a bugle and read out my itinerary for the day, finishing with the command that I call my mom).
I can't really blame Ransom for those ideas (nor do I wish to show disrespect for his dedication to reading older books), since the person who did more to popularize them than anyone else is John Gardner in his masterpiece of hypocrisy, On Moral Fiction. Never mind that Gardner was a lifelong alcoholic and notorious for feeling up his eighteen-year-old students and getting physical with his wife. The real problem, according to him, was famous writers who wrote in styles he disliked.
Like many people with substance abuse problems, he needed to find a grid of faraway discipline to aspire to and to hold his less-alcoholic peers up to contemptuously. Because of him, reviewers and critics have been derailed into ad hominem about the morality of conspicuous stylists for the past forty years.
Another person I blame for this is not American but British. In Modern English Usage, Fowler tells us a number of useful things (and is funny, too), but he also makes sweeping judgments about the motives of people who do things like pronounce French words with a French accent. It all comes down to Fowler's thesis that odd choices in words, style and pronunciation are the affectations of middle- and lower-class people who do not realize that the upper classes carefully avoid such things. In Fowler's view, the admirable upper classman professes not to be familiar with obscure areas of knowledge because that would be admitting to unseemly and antisocial toil.
Fowler could not conceive of the idea that
unself-conscious people, too, might learn other languages and study subjects that lent them idiosyncratic habits of usage. Fowler was himself such an obsequious admirer of royalty that his reflexive imitation of their style prevented his understanding that those who discover their own modes of expression are often not imitating anyone else at all -- least of all British royalty, those gods of leisure and social inequity, some of whom lounged instead of worked, and spent their most ambitious moments riding ponies through marshes and playing patio games in mansions.
Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins were not 14th Century writers, but they did spend lifetimes developing eccentric idioms and ever-more recondite elisions in syntax and metaphor. Yet they were neither showing off, aspiring to be royalty nor demonstrating some sort of corruption of the aesthetic soul. They were writers who grew isolated at the same time their poetry flourished. They wrote in their own voices and did so for themselves alone, with the conviction of persons whispering devastating truths to themselves. To suggest anything else is either an act of projection or a demonstration of unfamiliarity.