Daniel D’Addario has an insightful article up at Salon titled “Beloit College is Trolling Us All.”

Some highlights:

Over time, Beloit’s professors ran out of things like “the AIDS crisis” and delved deeper into arcana or just meaningless incidents; the list’s entries often read like the setup for an observation, one that the list-makers aren’t willing to make but are happy to imply. Here are the only types of entries on the mind-set list:

1. [any celebrity or public figure] has always been [either dead or, more commonly, famous]
2. [something completely random that one thinks about quite infrequently] has always been the case
3. College freshmen have never seen [consumer product that is an easy punch line — think eight-track tapes, Betamax, etc.] OR have always been able to [thing you can do with technology]
4. College freshmen have never known about or experienced [news event from the recent past that everyone — EVERYONE! — has heard of or experienced]
5. Bad puns about technology…

Aside from the hackiness of the puns, the thing that jumps out is that the majority of these things governing a student’s “mind-set” are actually not that important. Does an incoming college freshman have any idea who Bill Maher is? Has a spray-paint ban in Chicago any connection to, well, anything other than aspiring Illinois graffiti artists? The list’s particular obsession with technology signifies both a nostalgia that’s deeply uninteresting (these kids with their iPads — things were so much simpler when we all played “Pong,” or better yet, stickball in the street!) and a willingness to make sweeping implications about the degree to which Technology Has Changed Everything that is many things, but is not academic.