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 It assumes that students view their profs as relics of a bygone age dropping outdated references to previous generations they shouldn’t be expected to know.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.

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.”

The two favorite words of the Beloit Mindset List are “always” and “never.” For instance,
“There has always been football in Jacksonville but never in Los Angeles” (Class of 2016, #14), “There has always been a World Trade Organization” (Class of 2016, #49),
“The Communist Party has never been the official political party in Russia” (Class of 2015, #23), and “Food has always been irradiated.” (Class of 2014, #51).

The first list (Class of 2002) had a mere 13 “always” items and 10 “never” items in its 43-items list. By the Class of 2013 list, there were 59 “always” items and 14 “never” items among the 75 entries.

Some of these claims are limited to the experience of students themselves, e.g., “They have never owned a record player” (Class of 2002, #14), but most them are written as absolute ontological claims: “Genomes of living things have always been sequenced.” (Class of 2016, #74).

Are college freshman so stupid that they don’t realize that gene sequencing is a modern development unknown to the Pilgrims or the Founding Fathers? That’s a question that doesn’t even make sense. By the logic of the Mindset list, “There never were Pilgrims” and “The Founding Fathers have never existed.” If something happened over 18 years ago, the little solipsists can’t conceive of it.

One of the guiding principles of the Beloit Mindset list is that college freshman are so incredibly stupid that they don’t understand that things happened before they were born.