A: yes, and for very particular material/ideological and profession-specific reasons. i'm talking about humanities professors, here, as a big stereotyped lump. first of all, like it or not, we labor in the shadow of the romantic notion of the Author. i know, i know, we know better! but still, there's a personal, tender, one-to-one connection between what we write and our Selves that is different than, say, grant writers, who are writing with a goal in mind for a third party. we academic types write for a living (and evaluate others' writing), and it's not always so obviously goal-oriented as it perhaps could or should be. and when that writing does not succeed, somehow it is our mushy little mewling selves that are not succeeding. it's a big challenge to get over that.
second. the job and the training for it are such that skills and knowledge are portable and stick with you, and that you are valued for You, and not for your contributions to a larger group or institution. of course you are supposed to contribute to the body of scholarship in your area of expertise, and of course you are supposed to bring glory to your employer through grants and publications, etc. BUT those contributions and that glory come from You, laboring under the above-mentioned shadow of Authorship. and so in many emphatic ways you are working for yourself, and are told repeatedly, albeit tacitly, that you are working for yourself and that your work comes from yourself.
third. professorial types have a lot of cultural capital. whether that is awed or resented (hi, Anonymous!) doesn't matter; no matter how much or how little people know about the higher education industry, they probably have a pretty strong opinion about it; stronger, at least, than their opinions about similarly specialized and extensively trained professions like actuaries or opera singers. that is because professor types are public figures. and public figures in a teeny tiny world, in which reputation matters A LOT.
there are other professions that operate similarly. counterintuitive though it may seem, i often think of hair stylists this way. if you've ever gotten your hair cut at a salon, you might know that the person working on your head basically rents their spot from the salon; that is, they're running their own little business under an agreement from the person who controls the physical space of that business. but they basically work for themselves in a creative industry that is variously called upon to answer to its comparatively unschooled clientele. of course, people do not see hair stylists in the same way as they see professors, but the material similarities are there. i'm sure there are other such similar professions.
if you are an academic-type and you think you are above this (or beside it, depending upon your philosophical topography), how nice for you. but i use this to try to explain/live with my own sometimes petulant responses at being told what to do by, say, my chair, as well as to explain/live with my colleagues' reponses to things i think they should be happy about for the Greater Good even if it has or had nothing to do with them. oh yeah, plus i am worried about tenure. ok, down off the soap box now.
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My immediate reaction to this (and what’re anonymous web forums for, if not immediate reactions?) is to focus on your use of the word “ego” in the title. If we understand “ego” as “sense of self,” what you describe (even the anxiety over job security) could effectively be boiled down to a statement about how central your work is to your sense of self. In other words, what you describe is a situation in which work and leisure and all the rest are invested in the same issues, as opposed to, say, my brother, who works, has a family, and plays basketball – and sees these activities as largely independent of one another. So contrasting you with him, I wonder if it’s not that you have a “bigger” ego, but a more concentrated one – since your work, your family, and your appreciation of espressotinis are all integral to the material/ideological apparatus you use to understand yourself. (Just as you, I’m guessing, would see his work, his family, and his fondness for USC sports as of a piece.) These things are related – not because of you, but because there’s no (or very little) institutional boundary separating work from leisure for an academic (author, artist, etc). Indeed, ironically and as opposed to other professions, we do our work (writing) precisely when we’re not working (teaching). Not only is there no spatial or temporal wall separating work from leisure (a wall that would/could “fracture” an ego), they’re actually fused together. We’re always doing both. So while it might seem that we’re always strutting around like academics, we are, in practice, always academics. (Whereas my brother is only a whatever-the-heck-it-is-he-does-for-a-living from 9-5, M-F)
Of course, I’m personally of the opinion that the separation between work and leisure (public and private, production and consumption, etc) are all on the decline anyway. So [you heard it here first]: in the 21st century, bigger egos all around!
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