PEA Soup

Performance Evaluations in an Entrepreneurial Work Culture

As summer comes to a close and we get ready to return to the classroom, I've been thinking more about the different shapes my colleagues' summers have taken, about how much we've written and how much real holiday we've taken.  As a philosophy department chair, one of my responsibilities is chairing the department's annual performance evaluation committee and each year I'm struck anew by how hard some of my colleagues work. I feel humbled by how much very high quality work some colleagues publish.

Institutions, Systems, Structures

Folks who work on oppression often distinguish oppression attributable to individuals from oppression attributable to institutions.  Thus, there's a lot of discussion about institutional racism or sexism, say, as well as discussion of systematic or structural racism or sexism.  Here's a quick question: anyone have any thoughts on the nature of the relation between the institutional, the systematic, and the structural?  Are these terms just being used as synonyms, at least in the relevant literature?  I have a vague feeling that it is possible to have non-systematic and non-structural institutions, but (since the relevant systems and structures are all social systems and structures, I presume), I'm not sure that there are any non-institutional (social) structures or (social) systems.  Any thoughts?

Black Women in Philosophy

In case you haven't seen it, there is an article on Black women in philosophy in the Chronicle of Higher Ed today:
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=rVDdSShyYzsDdqdVtrhbFS234msgNfm3