My first introduction to the Beloit College Mindset List came in one of our pre-semester all-college meetings a few years back. Our then college president shared some items with us from the list and the older faculty in the room could be heard to gasp audibly at some of them. Our president echoed the list’s creators’ finger-wagging admonishment to “watch your references,” which I find insulting. It assumes that every generation knows nothing, nor cares, about what came before the year they were born. The “generation gap” the Beloit list hopes to bridge is seemingly caused by stodgy old professors safely tucked away in their ivory towers from pop culture clashing with students too hip to know the roots or precedents of anything they consume in the present. The list assumes that old profs are also not able to cope with the passing of time, being startled that something they remember well happened so long ago. It assumes that students view their profs as relics of a bygone age dropping outdated references to previous generations they shouldn’t be expected to know.

The assumed and explicit stereotypes that the list and its ancillary materials rely on are especially troubling. For example, the “Guide To The Mindset List For The Class of 2016” (http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/assets/GuideTo2016MindsetList.pdf) lets us know that “The male members of the class are, not uncommonly, pretty good cooks of inexpensive organic food.” As a stodgy old prof am I supposed to be surprised by this? Is this meant to shatter my old prof worldview that only women are interested in cooking whereas men only prefer to dine on easy to prepare junk food?

The 2017 list that we prepared in a just few hours at Beloitcollegemindlessness to preempt the BCML should show that we know the simple mindset and methods of the list’s creators. Although many of the items we generated were intended as parody, it was interesting to see how many of our items actually matched or were quite similar to the BCML. This should prove that anyone can generate a rough equivalent of the list if they wish, so the genuine item can be rendered defunct much like the 1969 Seattle Pilots MLB team which no one from any generation remembers.