Thomas Zurhellen, Mindset List Co-Author?

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An article in the Beloit Daily News claims that the Class of 2023 Mindset List was “crafted by “[Tom] McBride, [Ron] Nief, Charles Westerberg and Marist College assistant [sic] professor of English Tom Zurhellen.”

That’s the first time I’ve heard of Zurhellen, who is actually an associate professor. Recall that a story in The Chronicle of Higher Education credited McBride, Nief, Westerberg, Marist’s School of Liberal Arts dean Martin Shaffer, director media relations Julia Fishman, and “a group of faculty members at Marist.” It’s unclear to me why the authorship of the List is so mysterious.

Zurhellen seems like an impressive character: his achievements include writing a trilogy of novels “that reimagine the life of Jesus in modern-day North Dakota” and walking from Portland, Oregon, to Poughkeepsie, New York, this summer to raise awareness about veterans’ suicide rates.

You’d think he’d bring a fresh perspective to the Mindset List and maybe he will in the future. Sadly, whatever contributions he made to the Class of 2013 List are lost in the usual morass of always and never.

#44 in a Series Examining Every Item on the Mindset List

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Some Mindset List items are so horrific that they break the bounds of the English language:

A Catholic Pope has always visited a mosque. (Class of 2023, #55)

This is not an idiomatic English sentence. A normal native speaker of English would never string these words together. It hurts the head of this native English speaker to read them.

Yet this strange word combination showed up on the Marist Mindset List—the product of at least seven people, some of whom must be native English speakers, viz. the three usual suspects from Beloit, Marist’s School of Liberal Arts dean Martin Shaffer, director media relations Julia Fishman, and “a group of faculty members at Marist.”

I don’t expect a college administrator to write coherent English sentences, but shouldn’t a director media relations be able to spot a problem with item #55?

Although a native speaker may have trouble with that sentence, anyone familiar with the Mindset List can translate it into acceptable English: Approximately 18 years ago, the pope visited a mosque.

Indeed, in May 2001, Pope John Paul II visited the Great Omayyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria.

Learning of this event, a curious person might ask questions such as these: Did this incident lead Pope John Paul II or his successors to visit other mosques? Did this visit change Catholic-Islamic relationships, decreasing tension between two faiths or increasing dialogue? Did the experience of growing up as a Catholic or Muslim change because of this visit or its aftermath? Do 18-year-olds care about this event? Do they even know about it?

If any of these questions occured to you, I can say definitively that you are not involved in creating the Mindset List.

Such questions are completely beside the point of the Mindset List, which is to list things that happened 18 years ago. That’s how the Beloit MIndset List worked and, sadly, it’s now how the Marist Mindset List works as well.

The Chronicle Reports on New Mindset List Home

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The Chronicle of Higher Education just published an article on the Mindset List’s new home (subscription required).

Here are some points of interest from the article by Dan Troop:

The exact events leading to the end of the list’s relationship to Beloit College are still a mystery

As for “why” and “who,” [Ron] Nief said the college had “ended the relationship rather abruptly.”

“Beloit had serious issues it was dealing with, and the communications and marketing people could not provide the support we needed with all the critical issues on their plate,” he wrote. “There was little explanation, but there was no real partnership.”

A Beloit spokeswoman said on Tuesday that the college had no comment on Nief’s assertion.

The origin story of the Mindset List reported by the Chronicle differs from the story previously offered by Tom McBride and Ron Nief

Messrs. McBride and Nief have previously claimed that the first mindset list was written anonymously by someone else and inspired them to write their own annual version. This version is still on Wikipedia:

[The List] originated in 1997 as an e-mail forward, without author credits, passed on by then College Statistician Richard Miller to Ron Nief, who passed it on to peers at other schools.… It reappeared in the fall of 1998 after requests from peers who mistook the forward as having originated with Ron Nief. Ever since, Nief and McBride have collaborated to create The List…

The new version in the Chronicle claims the idea was invented at Beloit:

The origins of the list are a bit hazy, but the story generally goes that some Beloit professors and staff members were unwinding on a Friday afternoon, commenting on the occasional blank looks they got from students unaware of relatively recent history or culture. So Nief, McBride, and others started writing down their thoughts and circulating them to encourage faculty members to “mind the generation gap” separating them from their students.

Marist faculty contributed to the creation of the Class of 2023 List

According to the Chronicle, the list was put together by Beloit’s Nief, McBride and sociologist Charles Westerberg in collaboration with Marist’s School of Liberal Arts dean Martin Shaffer, director media relations Julia Fishman, and “a group of faculty members at Marist.” “That arrangement will continue for at least the next couple years, all parties agreed.”

I can’t tell the difference. Whatever contributions Marist faculty made, they fit into the flawed premises of the Beloit version.

At some point Marist is going make the list better

Martin Shaffer, dean of Marist’s School of Liberal Arts, and Julia Fishman, director of media relations, said people at the college are excited by the opportunity to help the list evolve and grow.

“We want to give it more heft,” said Shaffer, who sees potential to infuse the playfulness of the list with his college’s expertise in polling, perhaps organizing roundtable discussions to more deeply explore certain topics.…

“The Marist folks are getting our minds around how we might use the list, how the list might change,” Shaffer said. “It’s very possible we might do different kinds of lists,” perhaps some from the student perspective.

If Marist wants some ideas for improving the list, mine are here and here.

Awaiting the Marist Mindset List

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The first Marist Mindset List is set to drop Wednesday, August 21.

Marist College picked up the Mindset List after Beloit College dumped it a year ago for lack of alignment with the college’s “brand attributes.”

Marist College is home to the Marist Institute for Public Opinion and Marist Poll so one would hope they might incorporate some actual data into the list. We’ll find out soon whether they managed to do that this year.

This “sneak preview” featuring Tom McBride suggests more of the same. The list’s “launch,” McBride says, will be on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

After Marist took over the list, McBride stopped posting his strange video rants on the Mindset List Facebook page. However, two months ago he began posting new rants but with the same poor production values and paucity of views on a Mindset List Moments YouTube page. In one of them he claims, bizarrely, that James Buchanan was “asexual.”

You have assume that Marist is hoping McBride’s involvement won’t last much longer.

If anyone has any information on the details of the arrangement between Marist and Mindset List triumvirate, please send us a line.

More nonsense from Ron Nief

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Georgette Braun, ace reporter for the Rockford Register Star, appears to be the first journalist to look into why Beloit College dumped the Mindset List, as reported in her August 26 article, “Beloit College drops Mindset List.”

Unfortunately, neither Beloit nor Ron Nief gave her any useful information so her best source is this humble blog, specifically our post, Mindset List doesn’t “speak to the college’s key brand attributes” says “social listening agency.”

What struck my interest was this preposterous claim by Nief: “If you read the lists, it never says ‘They don’t know.’ It’s about their life experiences. TWA never existed in their lifetime. It doesn’t say, “They don’t know TWA.’”

I knew immediately this wasn’t true because Nief and Tom McBride are incorrigible fabricators of claims about the Mindset List. Thus, the following examples of the Mindset List claiming that entering college students don’t know something:

They do not know what the Selective Service is, but men routinely register for it on their financial aid forms. (Class of 2005, #36)

They have probably never used carbon paper and do not know what cc and bcc mean. (Class of 2005, #39)

With little need to practice, most of them do not know how to tie a tie. (Class of 2009, #6)

The Biblical sources of terms such as “Forbidden Fruit,” “The writing on the wall,” “Good Samaritan,” and “The Promised Land” are unknown to most of them. (Class of 2016, #3)

While they’ve grown up with a World Trade Organization, they have never known an Interstate Commerce Commission. (Class of 2017, #23)

Family Guy is the successor to the Father Knows Best they never knew. (Class of 2021, #54)

Attention journalists! Don’t fall for the Mindset List’s tall tales. Its creators’ claims about the list’s origins and benevolent purpose are no more accurate than their claims about the knowledge of entering college students.

#43 in a Series Examining Every Item on the Beloit Mindset List

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Starbucks has always served venti Caffè Lattes in Beijing’s Forbidden City. (Class of 2022, #34)

The Starbucks in the Forbidden City closed in 2007.

After making dumb mistakes like this year after year, you’d think the Mindset crew would bother doing some fact-checking. When I Googled “starbucks forbidden city,” the entire first page of results was about the Starbucks closing in 2007. The BML authors claim it takes them “between three and six months”(!) to create the list, but they can’t bother to make a few cursory web searches?

Mindset List doesn’t “speak to the college’s key brand attributes” says “social listening agency”

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I can think of any number of reasons why Beloit College would want to sever its relationship with the Beloit Mindset List. But a January post (“Digital Brand Reputation and Social Listening: Beloit College”) on the Campus Sonar Brainwaves blog suggests the real reason might be a lack of alignment with the college’s “brand attributes.”

First of all, I will note that Campus Sonar is led by a “recognized thought-leader”/“strategic thinker”/“social listening expert” so you know it’s a legitimate organization, not a bunch of grifters taking advantage of a liberal arts college with a $7 million budget deficit.

According the blog post:

A longstanding liberal arts school, Beloit College, wanted to change public perception and re-invent its brand as a premier destination for the future. Tim Jones, Chief Communications and Integrated Marketing Officer, was charged with cultivating demand for the college and creating a niche in the market. To do this, the college needed to shift its narrative, telling the story of Beloit College as a premium product in the market, worthy of the price point. Tim knew social listening could help and enable them to see the total conversation, including how it bends and shifts and rises and falls around certain topics.

Tim and the marketing gurus at Campus Sonar cooked up three “brand attributes” of Beloit: liberal arts in practice, mentorship, and social justice. Next Campus Sonar

worked with Beloit College to analyze the data, segment the conversation, categorize opportunities and influencers, and identify emerging trends. Based on the analysis, Beloit College assembled a comprehensive picture of the narratives and topics that surrounded their brand. They discovered that the conversation dominating the marketplace was fairly hollow—the name of a place with average athletic teams. The exception was the Mindset List (an annual compilation of the values that shape the mindset of students about 18 years old and entering college), which didn’t speak to the college’s key brand attributes.

Clearly no one at Campus Sonar took a look at the Mindset List since it is clearly not an “annual compilation of values.” Anyway, “social listening” revealed that what students posted about Beloit College on social media was quite different from “the positive sentiments that came out of the student survey.” Go figure! For instance, students think the food stinks:

They found the root causes for some of the conversations that were happening, which was helpful in shaping the way they behave and administer services as a college. For example, dining service—what people say, think, and share about food service made the college recognize the need for conversation transparency, and provided the opportunity to listen to student concerns in a forum that’s separate from policy making. In turn, using social media to engage with students allowed the college to shape and enable more practical, informal conversations.

The bit about “a forum that’s separate from policy making” cuts to the heart of this enterprise: Let’s design an opportunity for the students to complain about the victuals that will trick them into posting nicer things on social media without actually serving them better food. And that is what’s called “conversation transparency.”

My favorite part of the blog post is probably the claim that issuing a press release caused “trending topics [to] change from ‘sunset’ and ‘click’ to ‘scholarship’ and ‘mentorship.’ Seeding and fostering the conversation was very influential.” Indeed. But I digress. Here is the conclusion of the report’s findings on the Mindset List:

Social listening is key to Beloit College making progress in monitoring their reputation and aligning their online narrative with their brand attributes. For example, Campus Sonar’s analyst Amber worked with Tim to analyze two major segments of the college’s online conversation: athletics and the Mindset List (an annual publication from Beloit College faculty). This analysis approach helped Tim get a clean look at what Beloit College’s audience was saying, and he discovered that these topics didn’t contribute positively or negatively to the conversation around the college.

To illustrate, online conversation volume for Beloit College increased about five times its normal amount for less than a week after the Mindset List is published online. Sentiment of the larger-than-normal conversation remains mostly neutral, and combined with the fact that the conversation earned from the list isn’t aligned with Beloit College brand attributes, Tim was able to start thinking about the continued value of producing this list. Should they continue to do so if it isn’t aligned with their brand? If its [sic] decided to phase it out, could Beloit College strategically leverage the conversation around the list and redirect interest in it to promoting the college as a premier college destination instead?

I guess we know now what Tim decided about “the continued value of producing the list.” But what’s that last part about? Beloit is supposed “strategically leverage the conversation” about killing the list to promote themselves as “a premier college destination”? How would that work?

Campus Sonar’s blog post isn’t a smoking gun, but it’s as good a story as I’ve found about the reasoning behind Beloit’s decision—a very good decision whatever its rationale—to divorce itself from the Mindset List.

Obviously, Beloit and Campus Sonar are “socially listening” to this post. (Hello, Tim!) If anyone associated with these fine institutions has any further information (e.g., memos, email exchanges) on the background of this decision, please send it our way.

Here We Go Again

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The Class of 2022 Mindset List is upon us.

Here is how Ron Nief spins the break-up with Beloit College.

“All good things must come to a conclusion,” notes the Mindset List’s creator Ron Nief, Public affairs director emeritus at Beloit College. This will be the last year that the Mindset List will be associated with Beloit College, but it will continue in the future at themindsetlist.com or at a new institutional home. “We have enjoyed our 20 plus years of association with Beloit College, where the List began,” said Ron Nief.

Since the Mindset List appears nowhere on Beloit’s web site, the college apparently thinks the association has already been severed.

We’ll have analysis of the list throughout the week.