polyglot conspiracy

Not about linguistics, but today, a member of my university community who I will not name made the following comment:

Here at Michigan, it’s easy to get students to write summaries. They’re good at writing summaries, and it’s easy to get them to do it - this is not some community college where you’d have to give them pizza and rewards to get them to do it.

I was pretty upset by this. First of all, this was said in a context of pedagogical exploration, in which one of the ostensive goals is to teach us (graduate students) how to teach undergraduates in such a way as to improve their academic performance and experience, in particular their academic writing. I do not take it as one of our goals to uphold a false dichotomy of good v. lazy students that is based on superficial, institutionalized, economically-driven notions of “prestige.” I would furthermore like to think of this as something that prepares me to take on challenges of teaching in ANY academic setting, not just the golden halls of UMich.

Second, as a fellow grad student pointed out, in my experience there is not one out-of-classroom event at UMich that does not include some culinary enticement. On the above-undergraduate level, people don’t go to talks and expect no food. People don’t go to department meetings and expect no food. People don’t generally do service-related activities unless they are forced into it, or there is food (there are clear exceptions to this, but still). But oh, look at us, we’re so lucky to be at Michigan, where all the students do all their work all the time and we don’t have to do anything to prod them; thank goodness we’re not at Washtenaw where the students might have things other than college to worry about sometimes or just not feel like paying tens of thousands of dollars every year so that they can be judged by pretentious, condescending instructors. Sheesh.