My understanding (I used to do some work in distance education) is that one of the reasons Harvard/MIT founded eduX rather than partner with Coursera or Udacity is they were unable to get past the 'for profit' model, and there was some unwillingness to discuss how the 'profit' was going to be made.

I think a lot of the academic scepticism does come from the for-profit - not to say for-profit education can't work, just that it is somewhat new territory for many institutions.