Our latest round-up of Class of 2017 Mindset List mockery:

The A.V. Club (Milwaukee edition) reports that “Beloit College releases lame Mindset List, wonders what’s up with kids and their Nintendos or whatever“:

The 2013 Mindset List—which examines the born-in-1995 class of 2017—is equally lame and random. For 18-year-olds, according to Nief and McBride, “a tablet is no longer something you take in the morning” (get it?), and “PayPal has replaced a pen pal as a best friend on line.” Incisive cultural analysis or a collection of Jay Leno-worthy groaners that betray a desperate “Old Man Yells At Cloud” fear of technology and youth? You decide.

Happily, the list has been drawing a fair amount of local and national criticism.

Bloggers at Unqualified Offerings and Orange Crate Art both offer some item-by-item criticism. The latter (Michael Leddy) links to his more in-depth critique from 2010:

What bothers me about the Beloit list involves some unspoken assumptions about reality and young adults. The list reads like a nightmare-version of the proposition that begins Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921): “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.” “The world is all that is the case” — all that is the case, that is, in the life-experience of a hypothetical eighteen-year-old American student.…

The Beloit list seems to suggest that if it hasn’t happened during your lifetime, well, it can’t really be real (witness the weirdly Orwellian statement that “Czechoslovakia has never existed”), or, at best, that you cannot be expected to know or care about it.…

An interviewer once asked the poet David Shapiro to name his favorite living poet. Wallace Stevens, he said. “But Stevens is dead,” the interviewer objected. “But not for me!” Shapiro replied.… I suspect that among this year’s incoming freshmen are some for whom Wallace Stevens (or Emily Dickinson, or E.E. Cummings, or Langston Hughes) is still living, for whom a pocket notebook and pen or pencil are tools of thought and introspection, and for whom Czechoslovakia is as real as it gets.

Finally, Hudson Hongo at Thought Catalog offers “The Real Mindset List for the Class of 2017” with entries such as these:

1. For this generation of entering college students, born in 1995, ALF, Ricky Martin and Queen Victoria have always been dead.

5. Thanks to global warming, they have zero words for snow.

6. “Eminem” has always been a scowling white man and if presented with an actual M&M an 18-year-old would die of shock.

7. They have never seen a squirrel.

12. “Sexting” has always been something you do with a phone, not a sextant.

19. College professors have always been able to trick lazy news editors into posting academically-flavored linkbait.

 

Here are some highlights of first day media coverage of the Class of 2017 Mindset List and of Beloit Mindlessness:

As we discussed in an earlier post, Insider Higher Ed’s Scott Jaschik reported on our valient efforts in Whose Mindset?

We also received coverage from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in Karen Herzog’s article “Is Beloit College’s Pop Culture Review a Mindset List or Mindlessness?” which includes a defense of the list from Tom McBride:

McBride said they “welcome critiques of all sort” because the list is intended to spark discussions.

“The most important thing, I believe, is the two at beloitmindlessness seem to be in a distinct but very small minority,” McBride said Tuesday, after this year’s list was released.

“Millions seem to look forward to the list every year — we get constant contacts about it, and the number of hits on the Beloit College website each year is in excess of one million,” he said.

They work hard on the list “to make sure its research is accurate and that we stay within time lines,” McBride said.

One out of two ain’t bad?

“But the main thing to know is that the list is just the tip of a much more thoughtful set of ideas and reflections about what is after all the subject of ‘King Lear’ and of nearly all Shakespeare’s comedies: the generation gap.”

So he’s claiming that he has access to a “much more thoughtful set of ideas and reflections” but gives us the Mindset List instead?

As a discussion-starter, the list provides a chance for those of different generations to trade “when I was 18 stories,” McBride said, “and it’s a great stimulus for discussion of such issues as the cost of college, the perils of multitasking, the meaning of entering ‘cyberspace,’ and whether or not this ‘sharing’ generation — for that’s what we think they are — will become the next great force in American life.”

McBride and Nief are asked every year to speak around the country about the list.

“Yes, you do have to be a bit thick-skinned,” McBride said of critics, “but we wouldn’t give anything for the fun we’ve had in so many conversations about the generation gap and the future with people from so many walks of life.”

We also were mentioned in an article in the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer.

As we discussed here, Daniel D’Addario bashed the Mindset List in a Salon article titled “Beloit College Is Trolling Us All.”

Finally, a couple of radio personalities at Madison’s WMMM (105.5 FM) mock the Mindset List here. It’s probably most cogent discussion I’ve ever heard on FM radio.

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.