Author Archives: Prof. John Q. Angry

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

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As their parents held them as infants, they may have wondered whether it was the baby or Windows 95 that had them more excited. (Class of 2017, #6)

Their parents may have watched The American Gladiators on TV the day they were born. (Class of 2012, #42)

Their parents may have dropped them in shock when they heard George Bush announce “tax revenue increases.” (Class of 2012, #8)

Their nervous new parents heard C. Everett Koop proclaim nicotine as addictive as heroin. (Class of 2009, #73)

Parents may have been reading The Bourne Supremacy or It as they rocked them in their cradles. (Class of 2008, #9)

Trivial Pursuit may have been played by their parents the night before they were born. (Class of 2006, #40)

The Beloit Mindset List authors have developed a nice little trope here portraying parents as distracted by things that happened when their children were born. These take the generic form of “students’ parents were doing/thinking about X on the day the students were born or shortly thereafter.” Shouldn’t these parents have been better preoccupied with the birth of their child rather than news items, trivia and pop culture?

As my colleague Disgruntled Prof mentioned earlier, the BML authors “have a bleak view of parenthood.” The list above shows us just how bleak. The worst is the parents being so upset by rising taxes that they dropped their newborns. I wonder what other news items caused them to drop their children that year?

The laziest item on the above list is #42 from the Class of 2012 as it takes the form “Their parents may have watched [insert any TV show from 1994] on TV the day they were born. Why not The Commish, M.A.N.T.I.S., Unsolved Mysteries, The X-Files, The Cosby Mysteries, or even The Simpsons reruns?

I’ll save the BML authors some time and generate a few for their Class of 2018 list:

  • Their parents may have considered leaving them on the doorstep of a Manhattan brownstone after seeing a similar storyline on Law & Order.
  • Their parents may have accidentally locked them in family’s bomb shelter while being distracted stockpiling cans of peas and bottled water in preparation for the Y2K apocalypse.
  •  Their parents may have dropped them into a bowl of french onion dip at a Super Bowl party when Rams linebacker Mike Jones tackled Tennessee wide receiver Kevin Dyson on the one yard line to prevent a potential game-tying touchdown.
  • Their parents may have been arrested for child neglect after forgetting to feed them because they were playing Mario Party 2 for 18 hours straight on their Nintendo 64.

Feel free to leave your own items for the list in the comments section.

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

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Rites of passage have more to do with having their own cell phone and Skype accounts than with getting a driver’s license and car. (Class of 2017, #14)

Father: Sweetheart, times are tough, you can have a premium Skype account, or a driver’s license and a car, or we can throw you one hell of a debutante ball.

Daughter: That’s easy, I’ll take the Skype account!

The Mindset of the Mindset List Troubles Me

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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.

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

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While they’ve grown up with a World Trade Organization, they have never known an Interstate Commerce Commission. (Class of 2017, #23)

This item is ridiculous as it supposed that the Interstate Commerce Commission was more than a peripheral blip on the radars of most average Janes and Joes before it was abolished in 1995. It’s remaining regulatory responsibilities were transferred to the Surface Transportation Board (STB) post 1995. How many students consider the STB to be an important cultural touchstone today? Likewise, would they have cared much about the ICC had they lived during the previous generation? The most important thing the ICC did culturally was abolish segregation on bus lines and in railroad dining cars, but that happened in the 1950s and early 1960s. Given that, conceivably the ICC could have been an item on the BML for the class of 1979 if the BML existed then, but even that is a stretch.

Should we expect an item on the 2018 list that mentions the shuttering of the Board of Tea Appeals in 1996? The BTA was a federal agency that adjudicated claims by tea importers who were denied the right to sell their products by a board of tea-tasters who made sure tea imported into the U.S. was of sufficient quality. That sounds more important than what the ICC was or wasn’t doing during the year they were born.

Crusty old professors are still mourning the closure of all the defunct New Deal agencies, so the reminder that the Bureau of Tea Appeals is gone may hit a raw nerve.

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

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They have never seen Larry Bird play, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a football player. (Class of 2002, #31)

Members of the class of 2002 were born in 1980. Larry Bird retired from pro basketball in 1992 when members of this class would have been 12 so this item assumes that anyone in this class would not have watched professional basketball or noticed one of the NBA’s most popular players play for one of the league’s most popular teams until after the age of 12. The summer after his final NBA season, Bird played in all eight games for the gold-medal winning United States basketball “Dream Team” alongside Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Charles Barkley. Sports Illustrated called that team “arguably the most dominant squad ever assembled in any sport.” What 12 year old wouldn’t be interested in watching that given the hype surrounding the Olympics that year?

The second part of this item assumes that when two athletes have the same or similar  names the memories of the first (older) athlete are cancelled out by the existence of the second (younger) athlete. In this case the authors of the Beloit Mindset List want you to believe that a middling NFL running back had erased the memory of one of the NBA’s all time greats. In fact in the middle of Karim Abdul-Jabbar’s (nee Sharmon Shah) (KAJ-NFL) rookie season (1996) Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (KAJ-NBA) was named to the NBA’s “50 Greatest Players” list complete with the accompanying hoopla. The similarity between the two athletes’ names was mentioned in game recaps and KAJ (NBA) eventually sued KAJ (NFL) for trying to ride his name to glory and profit. KAJ (NBA) eventually prevailed and in 2000 KAJ (NFL) changed his name to Abdul-Karim al-Jabbar, but by that time all the HGH injections couldn’t salvage his brief NFL career.

KAJ (NBA) played in the NBA until members of the class of 2002 were 9 years old. As in the Larry Bird item above, to buy into this you would have to believe that kids don’t watch basketball until they are at least teenagers. Not only that, you would have to believe that kids on every basketball court in America had never tried a “sky-hook” and had never heard of its originator.

Six -time NBA champ, and six-time MVP, KAJ (NBA) played for 20 seasons and has a list of accomplishments too long to list here. Compare that to KAJ (NFL) who played five seasons from 1996-2006. He gained only 3,411 yards in his NFL career and was notable only for being the NFL touchdowns leader in 1997 with 33. His career ended with a whimper in 2000 with a one-game stint with the Indianapolis Colts in which he gained -2 yards on 1 rushing attempt.

This doubly dubious item clearly shows that the BCML’s authors know nothing about sports, fame, or the college students whose intelligences they attempt to insult.