An article in the Beloit Daily News claims that the Class of 2023 Mindset List was “crafted by “[Tom] McBride, [Ron] Nief, Charles Westerberg and Marist College assistant [sic] professor of English Tom Zurhellen.”

That’s the first time I’ve heard of Zurhellen, who is actually an associate professor. Recall that a story in The Chronicle of Higher Education credited McBride, Nief, Westerberg, Marist’s School of Liberal Arts dean Martin Shaffer, director media relations Julia Fishman, and “a group of faculty members at Marist.” It’s unclear to me why the authorship of the List is so mysterious.

Zurhellen seems like an impressive character: his achievements include writing a trilogy of novels “that reimagine the life of Jesus in modern-day North Dakota” and walking from Portland, Oregon, to Poughkeepsie, New York, this summer to raise awareness about veterans’ suicide rates.

You’d think he’d bring a fresh perspective to the Mindset List and maybe he will in the future. Sadly, whatever contributions he made to the Class of 2013 List are lost in the usual morass of always and never.

The Chronicle of Higher Education just published an article on the Mindset List’s new home (subscription required).

Here are some points of interest from the article by Dan Troop:

The exact events leading to the end of the list’s relationship to Beloit College are still a mystery

As for “why” and “who,” [Ron] Nief said the college had “ended the relationship rather abruptly.”

“Beloit had serious issues it was dealing with, and the communications and marketing people could not provide the support we needed with all the critical issues on their plate,” he wrote. “There was little explanation, but there was no real partnership.”

A Beloit spokeswoman said on Tuesday that the college had no comment on Nief’s assertion.

The origin story of the Mindset List reported by the Chronicle differs from the story previously offered by Tom McBride and Ron Nief

Messrs. McBride and Nief have previously claimed that the first mindset list was written anonymously by someone else and inspired them to write their own annual version. This version is still on Wikipedia:

[The List] originated in 1997 as an e-mail forward, without author credits, passed on by then College Statistician Richard Miller to Ron Nief, who passed it on to peers at other schools.… It reappeared in the fall of 1998 after requests from peers who mistook the forward as having originated with Ron Nief. Ever since, Nief and McBride have collaborated to create The List…

The new version in the Chronicle claims the idea was invented at Beloit:

The origins of the list are a bit hazy, but the story generally goes that some Beloit professors and staff members were unwinding on a Friday afternoon, commenting on the occasional blank looks they got from students unaware of relatively recent history or culture. So Nief, McBride, and others started writing down their thoughts and circulating them to encourage faculty members to “mind the generation gap” separating them from their students.

Marist faculty contributed to the creation of the Class of 2023 List

According to the Chronicle, the list was put together by Beloit’s Nief, McBride and sociologist Charles Westerberg in collaboration with Marist’s School of Liberal Arts dean Martin Shaffer, director media relations Julia Fishman, and “a group of faculty members at Marist.” “That arrangement will continue for at least the next couple years, all parties agreed.”

I can’t tell the difference. Whatever contributions Marist faculty made, they fit into the flawed premises of the Beloit version.

At some point Marist is going make the list better

Martin Shaffer, dean of Marist’s School of Liberal Arts, and Julia Fishman, director of media relations, said people at the college are excited by the opportunity to help the list evolve and grow.

“We want to give it more heft,” said Shaffer, who sees potential to infuse the playfulness of the list with his college’s expertise in polling, perhaps organizing roundtable discussions to more deeply explore certain topics.…

“The Marist folks are getting our minds around how we might use the list, how the list might change,” Shaffer said. “It’s very possible we might do different kinds of lists,” perhaps some from the student perspective.

If Marist wants some ideas for improving the list, mine are here and here.

The first Marist Mindset List is set to drop Wednesday, August 21.

Marist College picked up the Mindset List after Beloit College dumped it a year ago for lack of alignment with the college’s “brand attributes.”

Marist College is home to the Marist Institute for Public Opinion and Marist Poll so one would hope they might incorporate some actual data into the list. We’ll find out soon whether they managed to do that this year.

This “sneak preview” featuring Tom McBride suggests more of the same. The list’s “launch,” McBride says, will be on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

After Marist took over the list, McBride stopped posting his strange video rants on the Mindset List Facebook page. However, two months ago he began posting new rants but with the same poor production values and paucity of views on a Mindset List Moments YouTube page. In one of them he claims, bizarrely, that James Buchanan was “asexual.”

You have assume that Marist is hoping McBride’s involvement won’t last much longer.

If anyone has any information on the details of the arrangement between Marist and Mindset List triumvirate, please send us a line.