“Thank you for all,” &c.

I wrote an e-mail to my university’s president and board of trustees urging a fair offer to end the faculty strike. Contract negotiations ran for more than a year before the strike began. Negotiations resume today. I am sure my e-mail will be the tipping point.

In my message I made mention of a familiar bit of administrative language:

As a retired faculty member, I am long familiar with “Thank you for all you do.” Those words mean little or nothing to faculty who are underpaid.

This morning Google returns 2,360,000 results for thank you for all you do and thanks for all you do. The formulation is trite. It often functions as a hollow panacea: show ’em a little gratitude. In the real world, people express gratitude to particular persons, in specific circumstances. When I hear “Thank you for all you do,” I want to say “Oh yeah? Name one thing!”

A genuine way to express gratitude woukd be to pay people salaries commensurate with their ability and experience — or, at least, commensurate with the rate of inflation.