Thread by @KevinZollman

A thing I've noticed about myself and others as we move though careers in academia:

The transition from "powerless" to "powerful" is often imperceptible. People fail to realize when they have gained power over others, and fail to see how they might be misusing it. [thread]

Woke folks tend to be attuned to the standard dimensions of power: faculty have power over students, tenured faculty have power over untenured faculty, dominant groups have power over underrepresented groups.

Beyond that there's professional power that sometimes gets missed:

Young grad students have power over undergrads

Older grads have power over younger ones

Asst. profs have power over grads, job candidates, and non-TT faculty

But there's also the more subtle power of being known. We often don't notice when we've moved from "completely unknown" to "known" or from "known" to "well known."

So, we don't realize when our criticism and praise -- especially in public -- becomes an exercise in power.

There's also the boundary between social and institutional power. When I started, I quickly became assimilated into the culture of my department. I could affect change more than some more senior colleagues because it was easier for me to talk to those with institutional power.

The internet makes it even more complicated. There are prominent examples of people who may have relatively little credibility as scholars, but nonetheless wield substantial social power on the internet.

Of course, we all know examples of professors who I'm subtweeting. But there are also graduate students and junior faculty who have substantial power on twitter, even though they don't necessarily have much institutional power in the field.

Before you assume I'm being critical, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with having power. One just needs to be self-reflective about what one does to be sure one is not causing harm. I mention it because people often fail to notice when they start to wield "twitter-power."

I think some people miss their own power because they focus on the ways they are disempowered and ignore ways that they are empowered. I've had interactions where people seem to think "I can't be in a position of power, because I am powerless relative to [insert-group]."

Intellectually, we know that no one is all powerful or completely powerless. But I think that gets lost when we tell narratives about our position in the world. It's useful to reflect, not just on the ways others have power over us, but also on the ways we have power over others.