Big question. I've lived my whole professional life in a bitterly hierarchical system, the academic world of big research universities, and I've noticed some scary parallels to the MA world, which might supply at least part of the answer.
If you look at academics, the reason they perceive high rank the way they do is not really salary, or reputation. You don't get that much of a financial kick upward going from Associate to Full Professor, for example. And your reputation in the field is only indirectly associated with your formal rank. It's based much more on your `breakthrough' discoveries, the kind of thing you became known for, in many cases,
BEFORE you were promoted to Full. Nor is it simple academic survival: once you make Associate Professor, you typically have tenure and you're safe from harm. (You
earn that protection, mind—it's extremely tough to get tenure and plenty of Assistant Profs don't, in the end). So why do people obsessively pursue that rank? (and I speak as one who knows first hand just how obsessive it is...)
The answer is I think applicable not just to the university but to the MA world as well. It's this: when you join the university as a graduate student, you are socialized into a system which does not regard you as fully human; you have to earn treatment as a human being by advancement in the ranks. Get hired in a good dept. on a tenure-track line, that makes you 50% human (and you will be
treated by your tenured colleagues as half-human, make no mistake!
) Advance to tenure, and you're now 90% human... but not quite, eh? And that 10% difference is very conspicuous to someone who's grown up in the system. Advance to Full, and, well... now you're a human being. Bear in mind, if you get your first job at age 25, say, you may not make Full until you're in your early 40s, or later. So most of your adult life is learning the cultural currency of a particular ranking system that you've bought into by choosing that way of earning a livelihood, but obviously it's more than that: it's your life-culture, your worldview. I think something similar is going on in the MAs.
Think of a black belt as a Ph.D.; at this point, you're in a sense licensed to explore on your own. You have the basic skills, but still have a reputation to develop if you want respect in that world. And for a lot of people, that kind of respect is just as important as the respect young academics hope for from their peers or senior colleagues. The more you advance in rank, the more you're treated with respect, the more `human' you are. For people who have identified their `life-world' as that of the MAs, gaining that level of respect is probably just as important as it is for a new young faculty member to get acknowledgement of their worth from their older, now comfortably established senior colleagues who have proven themselves through decades of academic combat. I think that
that is what the constant pursuit of rank in the MAs is all about.
I've never understood that. But I think some people are biomechanical geniuses, in the same way that certain people launch careers as solo musicians when their age is still in single digits: they're prodigies. They were born to do MAs, and for them, it's like a sponge sucking in water.
