Monthly Archives: August 2013

Reason #3 the Beloit Mindset List is Worthless: Its central premise makes no sense

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The Beloit Mindset List has never made a direct reference to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Or the subsequent wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. Or the rise in security procedures or any other policy changes that took place after the attacks.

But how could it? These events happened in the past 12 years and the central premise of the Mindset List is that the mindset of a birth cohort—its set of “cultural touchstones”—is concocted from events that took place the year its members were born.

Each year’s list is constructed—and this point bears repeating over and over—by a couple guys going to a library and looking at microfiche of things that happened 18 years earlier.

Clearly this makes absolutely no sense. A person’s “mindset”—their understanding of how the world works, their values and interests, and so on—tends to be shaped by things that happened to them once they developed an understanding of their social environment more sophisticated than a newborn’s. Things that happened ten or five or even one year earlier are going to be far more important to an 18-year-old than things than happened 18 years ago.

9-11 and its aftermath must be more significant for understanding the “mindset” of American young people than roughly 99% of the trivia on the Mindset lists, but the Mindset Method dictates that they can’t be directly referenced.

Indirect references are okay as long as they are connected to something that happened roughly 18 years earlier. For instance,

Al-Qaida has always existed with Osama bin Laden at its head. (Class of 2009, #12)

Or how about this:

They were born the year Harvard Law Review Editor Barack Obama announced he might run for office some day. (Class of 2011, #17)

That’s all the Mindset List can offer about the election of the first black President, an event of great historical significance and of great personal significance for many young people. In 2022, the Mindset List (if it still exists) will inform us that for the Class of 2026, “There has never not been an African-American President,” or something similar. Until then, direct references to the election of Barack Obama are off-limits.

At some level, the Mindset creators must know that their method makes no sense. They must know that the al-Qaida attacks on 9-11 were of great significance. They didn’t read about al-Qaida’s founding in a 1987 newspaper—it wasn’t actually founded until 1988 or 1989—but they were looking for a way to sneak it onto their list. Ditto with Barack Obama’s election.

As long as the Mindset Method—the search for the mindset of 18-year-olds by reading 18-year-old newspapers—is intact, the Mindset List will remain completely and utterly worthless.

Look at Who Else Is Bashing the Mindset List (Class of 2014 version)

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Every August our fondest hope is that the latest Beloit Mindset List will be met with widespread scorn and disgust. And every August we are disappointed. However, the list is often met with selective scorn and disgust. 2010, when the Class of 2014 list was released, was a banner year for anti-Mindlist essays.

At NPR Linda Holmes asked, “Do College Students Really Think Beethoven Is A Dog?”

There’s nothing wrong with startling adults with how terribly old they are; it makes for a lovely little joke between 40-year-olds: “Wait, that movie came out that long ago?…”

But the fact that we feel old is not the responsibility of the class of 2014. Our sense of displacement when we realize how many years have passed since the last time we checked on something — how old Scott Baio got while we were off getting jobs and having families and voting for a series of presidents — isn’t their burden to bear, and assuming that they have ignored everything that happened before they were born is an awfully blunt way to measure “mindset.”…

This list isn’t about the mindset of the class of 2014. It’s about the mindset of the people who write it. It’s about what makes them feel ancient. It’s not about how college students think at 18; it’s about how we think at 40 and 50 and 60. It’s about how we think about the markers we once drove into the ground to mark what we considered Now, and how alarming it is to note that they are farther away than they used to be.

Interestingly, Holmes’ column takes particular aim at #58—”Beethoven has always been a dog”—but (as someone in the comments pointed out) the item was subsequently changed to read “Beethoven has always been a good name for a dog.” We can only hope that our item-by-item examination of every Mindset List can produce the kind of change that Holmes did.

Seth Saith posited that the “Latest ‘Mindset List’ Seems Terribly Out of Touch.”

Instead of “College Mindset,” I think the terrible 2010 list should simply be titled “Some things that happened in 1992.”…

Rather than simply an amalgamation of things that didn’t exist before one’s birth year, I tend to think “mindset”–whether individual or collective–is primarily culled from things that occur after we develop an awareness of the world around us. Though I have no kids, I’m apt to believe that most 18-year-olds don’t acutely remember or have much affinity for the way things were before Y2K, plus or minus a year or two in regards to certain things.

In his essay, “The Beloit College ‘Mindset’ List,” Kenneth Green proposes a “Reverse Mindset List” written by students.

Could I pass a version of the Mindset List, developed by college freshmen and focused on what they know and have experienced? That list would be laden with individuals, events, and references that are contextually important to undergraduates.

There is a good chance that that I would be clueless about many of the items on the “Reverse Mindset” List. What about you?

Finally, Beloit alumnus Adam Reger reveals his deep embarrassment with the list in “The Doleful Sigh of the Beloit College Mindset List.”

If current students are anything like my contemporaries, I can say that Beloit College students are probably rolling their eyes at this dumb thing. It’s condescending, even insulting… Worse, it does the opposite of what the Beloit student spends his/her time learning and striving for: it makes a teeming mass of individuals, bright and focused young people with well-developed skills and articulated goals, into a monolith; one, moreover, mostly notable for what they don’t know.…

[T]he sheer dumbness makes me want to shield my eyes. From the trying-too-hard (“Potato has always ended in an ‘e’ in New Jersey per vice presidential edict”) to the head-scratching-but-also-irrelevant (“While they were babbling in strollers, there was already a female Poet Laureate of the United States”), the Mindset List is dependably embarrassing.

Amen.

Reason #2 the Beloit Mindset List is Worthless: It highlights information about which most college students are indifferent or unaware

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The Beloit College Mindset List was allegedly created to “reflect the world view of entering first year students.” A straightforward understanding of the term “world view” would seem to be the way members members of the class see the world—their understanding of how the world works, what they consider important, their life philosophy, their value system, and so on.

Yet the majority of items on each year’s lists are information about which members of the class are indifferent or actually unaware.

The 2016 list refers to the color of M&Ms (#30), the nickname of a anti-missile program (#28), a comedian who doesn’t appear on a TV show (#37), a brand of analgesic (#44), a brand of hunting shoes (#50), ice skating competition rules (#52), the TV schedule of an old movie (#54), cable TV channels (#51 & #60), the host of a cable TV channel about old movies (#64), the display of opera lyrics (#39), a pizza chain advertising slogan, and the restoration of the Sistine Chapel (#75). It’s hard to imagine any of these are part of the “world view” of incoming college students. They are trivia.

Another set of items are intentionally chosen as items with which students are unfamiliar. The 2016 list includes items on the ignorance of students about expressions that originated in the Bible (#3), airline “tickets” (#9), luggage without wheels (#13), discontinued White House security procedures (#24), Billy Graham (#34), and a defunct baseball record (#73). Students’ ignorance could provide some insight into their world view if was ignorance of something significant, but these are just more trivia.

These items on student ignorance are products of the Mindlist’s alleged original purpose: “a witty [sic] way of saying to faculty colleagues ‘watch your references.'” However, a list of things about which students are ignorant is incompatible with “mindlist” purporting to reveal their “worldview.”

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

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Lenin’s name has never been on a major city in Russia. (Class of 2012, #38)

Muscovites have always been able to buy Big Macs. (Class of 2012, #52)

The Royal New Zealand Navy has never been permitted a daily ration of rum. (Class of 2012, #53)

Margaret Thatcher has always been a former prime minister. (Class of 2013, #5)

The KGB has never officially existed. (Class of 2013, #13)

The European Union has always existed. (Class 2013, #23)

McDonald’s has always been serving Happy Meals in China. (Class of 2013, #24)

Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Latvia, Georgia, Lithuania, and Estonia have always been independent nations. (Class of 2013, #38)

Disney’s Fantasia has always been available on video, and It’s a Wonderful Life has always been on Moscow television. (Class of 2013, #46)

Two Koreas have always been members of the UN. (Class of 2013, #67)

Official racial classifications in South Africa have always been outlawed. (Class of 2013, #68)

Conflict in Northern Ireland has always been slowly winding down. (Class of 2013, #71)

Czechoslovakia has never existed. (Class of 2014, #32)

American companies have always done business in Vietnam. (Class of 2014, #41)

They have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S. (Class of 2014, #68)

Japan has always been importing rice. (Class of 2015, #17)

The Communist Party has never been the official political party in Russia. (Class of 2015, #23)

Russian courts have always had juries. (Class of 2015, #46)

Folks in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City have always been able to energize with Pepsi Cola. (Class of 2015, #67)

The Sistine Chapel ceiling has always been brighter and cleaner. (Class of 2016, #75)

The Mindset List mavens do their research by looking at 18-year-old newspapers. Each year’s list consists mostly of confused references to things that happened 18 years earlier. Some of these things happened in other countries and most of these things are not going to be “cultural touchstones” for incoming college freshmen in the United States.

The 21 above items from the Classes of 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 & 2016 and (with one exception) are set entirely in foreign countries. Many of them are at least peripheral to the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Children growing up after the end of the Cold War had a different set of fears and understandings of the world than those of us who had to worry “about a Russian missile strike on the U.S.” (the item that gets to the point). This is a worthy point to make about the “mindset” of recent students, but it is obfuscated with references to such trivia as the availability of Big Macs, juries and “It’s a Wonderful Life” in Russia.

The end of apartheid was another big deal; college students throughout the U.S. demonstrated against it. But what’s with the Royal New Zealand Navy’s daily ration of rum, one of the most obscure references on any of the Mindset lists?

Taken together, the above items demonstrate a failure of the Mindset crew to be able to synthesize things that happened 18 years ago into any useful information about the mindset of incoming college students.

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

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Slavery has always been unconstitutional in Mississippi, and Southern Baptists have always been apologizing for supporting it in the first place. (Class of 2016, #38)

Slavery has been unconstitutional in Mississippi since 1865 when the 13th Amendment was ratified. Mississippi approved the amendment in 1995 (although that decision wasn’t sent to the U.S. Archivist until 2013), but this had no effect upon the constitutionality of slavery in Mississippi. A basic civics lesson would seem to be in order for the Mindset brain trust.

Southern Baptists did pass a resolution apologizing for their past support of slavery in 1995 (which is different than “always have been apologizing.”)

As with many Mindset List items, the primary problem with this one is not its factual accuracy—although it’s amazing how the List can screw up even the simplest facts in the interest of including the words “always been”—but that it claims that obscure events that happened when the class in question were babies shape its “mindset.”

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

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Their folks have never gazed with pride on a new set of bound encyclopedias on the bookshelf.  (Class of 2016, #18)

The final edition of Encyclopedia Britannica was published in 2010 and the print version of that encyclopedia wasn’t discontinued until 2012. World Book Encyclopedia is still available as bound volumes.

Bound encyclopedias were common in the 1970s and 1980s when the parents of the Class of 2016 were growing up, thus many of them likely had bound encyclopedias on their bookshelf.