Beloit Mindlessness is the focus of a story in today’s Inside Higher Ed, “Whose Mindset?”

Some highlights:

This year two anonymous professors — one from a large public university and the other from a community college — have declared their intent to destroy the list, which has been going strong since 1998. They are unveiling a site — Beloit Mindlessness— that is “dedicated to the mockery and eventual destruction of the Beloit mindset list.”…

The two professors specifically focus on the issue of relating everything to events that took place 18 years ago. “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,” Beloitmindlessness says. “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.”…

Asked why he would spend so much time on a site to take down the Mindset List, Disgruntled Professor said via e-mail: “It makes people in higher education look stupid. Students look stupid because they are portrayed as solipsistic idiots who don’t know anything about the world before they were born. It portrays professors as out-of-touch coots who use their class time to prattle on about who shot J.R., Madonna, the color of M&Ms and other trivia. It makes academic researchers look stupid because it is one of the most widely covered ‘reports’ on academic life — and it is of abysmal quality.”

And here is a response from Mindset co-creator Tom McBride:

Via e-mail, McBride said that he found the new site amusing, but that “the authors of the ‘mindless’ list are misreading the Mindset List. The point is not to portray today’s college students as lazy and solipsistic. On the contrary, we began our list 18 years ago because we were tired of other lists that did just that.”

I’ve read quite a bit about the creation of the Mindset list and this is the first time I’ve heard the claim that the list was made in response to even dumber and more condescending lists. I’d like to see an earlier version of this claim and an example of one of these other lists.

It’s hard to imagine anything more solipsistic than believing that your birthdate is the dividing line between “never” and “always”—which is how college students are portrayed in the Mindset List.

He added that the goals of the list include “to provide a concise overview of what has happened in the short lifetimes of entering college students — and to detail what has, in effect, always been ‘normal’ for them. It is not about their ignorance or navel-gazing or anything at all like that.” Further, McBride said he and Nief hoped “to spark intergenerational conversations within homes and classrooms” and “to remind teachers that some of their allusions and references are going to need a bit of explanation.”

The lists do not “provide a concise overview of what has happened in the short lifetimes of entering college students” because of their relentless focus on things that happened around the time of their birth.

McBride added: “Even sardonic parody is, perhaps, a perverse form of flattery. The verve of Beloit Mindlessness is itself ample testimony that students are very smart and industrious!”

Well, we’re actually professors, not college students, but that’s the level of accuracy we’ve come to expect from the Beloit Mindset List.