Author Archives: Disgruntled Prof

More nonsense from Ron Nief

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Georgette Braun, ace reporter for the Rockford Register Star, appears to be the first journalist to look into why Beloit College dumped the Mindset List, as reported in her August 26 article, “Beloit College drops Mindset List.”

Unfortunately, neither Beloit nor Ron Nief gave her any useful information so her best source is this humble blog, specifically our post, Mindset List doesn’t “speak to the college’s key brand attributes” says “social listening agency.”

What struck my interest was this preposterous claim by Nief: “If you read the lists, it never says ‘They don’t know.’ It’s about their life experiences. TWA never existed in their lifetime. It doesn’t say, “They don’t know TWA.’”

I knew immediately this wasn’t true because Nief and Tom McBride are incorrigible fabricators of claims about the Mindset List. Thus, the following examples of the Mindset List claiming that entering college students don’t know something:

They do not know what the Selective Service is, but men routinely register for it on their financial aid forms. (Class of 2005, #36)

They have probably never used carbon paper and do not know what cc and bcc mean. (Class of 2005, #39)

With little need to practice, most of them do not know how to tie a tie. (Class of 2009, #6)

The Biblical sources of terms such as “Forbidden Fruit,” “The writing on the wall,” “Good Samaritan,” and “The Promised Land” are unknown to most of them. (Class of 2016, #3)

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

Family Guy is the successor to the Father Knows Best they never knew. (Class of 2021, #54)

Attention journalists! Don’t fall for the Mindset List’s tall tales. Its creators’ claims about the list’s origins and benevolent purpose are no more accurate than their claims about the knowledge of entering college students.

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

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Starbucks has always served venti Caffè Lattes in Beijing’s Forbidden City. (Class of 2022, #34)

The Starbucks in the Forbidden City closed in 2007.

After making dumb mistakes like this year after year, you’d think the Mindset crew would bother doing some fact-checking. When I Googled “starbucks forbidden city,” the entire first page of results was about the Starbucks closing in 2007. The BML authors claim it takes them “between three and six months”(!) to create the list, but they can’t bother to make a few cursory web searches?

Mindset List doesn’t “speak to the college’s key brand attributes” says “social listening agency”

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I can think of any number of reasons why Beloit College would want to sever its relationship with the Beloit Mindset List. But a January post (“Digital Brand Reputation and Social Listening: Beloit College”) on the Campus Sonar Brainwaves blog suggests the real reason might be a lack of alignment with the college’s “brand attributes.”

First of all, I will note that Campus Sonar is led by a “recognized thought-leader”/“strategic thinker”/“social listening expert” so you know it’s a legitimate organization, not a bunch of grifters taking advantage of a liberal arts college with a $7 million budget deficit.

According the blog post:

A longstanding liberal arts school, Beloit College, wanted to change public perception and re-invent its brand as a premier destination for the future. Tim Jones, Chief Communications and Integrated Marketing Officer, was charged with cultivating demand for the college and creating a niche in the market. To do this, the college needed to shift its narrative, telling the story of Beloit College as a premium product in the market, worthy of the price point. Tim knew social listening could help and enable them to see the total conversation, including how it bends and shifts and rises and falls around certain topics.

Tim and the marketing gurus at Campus Sonar cooked up three “brand attributes” of Beloit: liberal arts in practice, mentorship, and social justice. Next Campus Sonar

worked with Beloit College to analyze the data, segment the conversation, categorize opportunities and influencers, and identify emerging trends. Based on the analysis, Beloit College assembled a comprehensive picture of the narratives and topics that surrounded their brand. They discovered that the conversation dominating the marketplace was fairly hollow—the name of a place with average athletic teams. The exception was the Mindset List (an annual compilation of the values that shape the mindset of students about 18 years old and entering college), which didn’t speak to the college’s key brand attributes.

Clearly no one at Campus Sonar took a look at the Mindset List since it is clearly not an “annual compilation of values.” Anyway, “social listening” revealed that what students posted about Beloit College on social media was quite different from “the positive sentiments that came out of the student survey.” Go figure! For instance, students think the food stinks:

They found the root causes for some of the conversations that were happening, which was helpful in shaping the way they behave and administer services as a college. For example, dining service—what people say, think, and share about food service made the college recognize the need for conversation transparency, and provided the opportunity to listen to student concerns in a forum that’s separate from policy making. In turn, using social media to engage with students allowed the college to shape and enable more practical, informal conversations.

The bit about “a forum that’s separate from policy making” cuts to the heart of this enterprise: Let’s design an opportunity for the students to complain about the victuals that will trick them into posting nicer things on social media without actually serving them better food. And that is what’s called “conversation transparency.”

My favorite part of the blog post is probably the claim that issuing a press release caused “trending topics [to] change from ‘sunset’ and ‘click’ to ‘scholarship’ and ‘mentorship.’ Seeding and fostering the conversation was very influential.” Indeed. But I digress. Here is the conclusion of the report’s findings on the Mindset List:

Social listening is key to Beloit College making progress in monitoring their reputation and aligning their online narrative with their brand attributes. For example, Campus Sonar’s analyst Amber worked with Tim to analyze two major segments of the college’s online conversation: athletics and the Mindset List (an annual publication from Beloit College faculty). This analysis approach helped Tim get a clean look at what Beloit College’s audience was saying, and he discovered that these topics didn’t contribute positively or negatively to the conversation around the college.

To illustrate, online conversation volume for Beloit College increased about five times its normal amount for less than a week after the Mindset List is published online. Sentiment of the larger-than-normal conversation remains mostly neutral, and combined with the fact that the conversation earned from the list isn’t aligned with Beloit College brand attributes, Tim was able to start thinking about the continued value of producing this list. Should they continue to do so if it isn’t aligned with their brand? If its [sic] decided to phase it out, could Beloit College strategically leverage the conversation around the list and redirect interest in it to promoting the college as a premier college destination instead?

I guess we know now what Tim decided about “the continued value of producing the list.” But what’s that last part about? Beloit is supposed “strategically leverage the conversation” about killing the list to promote themselves as “a premier college destination”? How would that work?

Campus Sonar’s blog post isn’t a smoking gun, but it’s as good a story as I’ve found about the reasoning behind Beloit’s decision—a very good decision whatever its rationale—to divorce itself from the Mindset List.

Obviously, Beloit and Campus Sonar are “socially listening” to this post. (Hello, Tim!) If anyone associated with these fine institutions has any further information (e.g., memos, email exchanges) on the background of this decision, please send it our way.

Here We Go Again

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The Class of 2022 Mindset List is upon us.

Here is how Ron Nief spins the break-up with Beloit College.

“All good things must come to a conclusion,” notes the Mindset List’s creator Ron Nief, Public affairs director emeritus at Beloit College. This will be the last year that the Mindset List will be associated with Beloit College, but it will continue in the future at themindsetlist.com or at a new institutional home. “We have enjoyed our 20 plus years of association with Beloit College, where the List began,” said Ron Nief.

Since the Mindset List appears nowhere on Beloit’s web site, the college apparently thinks the association has already been severed.

We’ll have analysis of the list throughout the week.

 

Is the end nigh?

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A few days ago I was searching online for the date when the next Beloit Mindset List would be released when I noticed that Beloit College has stopped hosting the list. All links with the URL beginning www.beloit.edu/mindset/ now redirect to themindsetlist.com, the “official home of The Mindset Lists.” Searching for the Mindset List on Beloit’s page still brings up results, but all those links are no longer active.

For the past several years, the new list was announced on both web pages, but Beloit College has apparently cut ties to Messrs. McBride and Nief. For our humble website, dedicated to the destruction of the once mighty Beloit Mindset List, this is good news indeed.

One of our commenters also claimed this week that “Beloit is dispensing with the Mindset List!” However, I can’t find any news online about this. If anyone knows more, please let us know.

It’s not hard to fathom why Beloit College has washed its hands of the Mindset List. Just look at the Mindset List Facebook page where (as I noted last year) a disheveled Tom McBride delivers incoherent video rants on such topics as “Enos Penis & Donald Trump,” “TRIED THE PLOW POSITION YET?”, “The day I got busted for throwing a jock strap in the band hall,” “Dear Millennials, Don’t Believe The Perfumed Bullshit They’ll Tell You About GROWING OLD!” (“growing old is a kind of slow-motion tragedy” that often involves being too unattractive to have sex), “Got a a persistent rash? Rub some toothpaste on it!”, “SOMETIMES RACISM IS NECESSARY. Here’s Why” (because killing “gooks” in Vietnam brought whites and black together), “3 Types of Witches” (“Recently I read that [witches have] the ability to rob men of their genitals”), “Joe’s Sex Toys,” and “No, Harry Potter does NOT do Fellatio!” McBride has produced over 500 of these bizarre videos since June 2015.

Obviously, Beloit College, which, like many liberal arts colleges, has fallen on hard times, does not need Tom McBride as its most prominent spokesperson.

Sadly, there will be a Mindset List released Tuesday, but Beloit College will have nothing to do with it.

Mindset List is a “map for marketers”?

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Last fall Professor Angry and I were contacted by Zach Brooke from the American Marketing Association, who wanted us to unmask ourselves to comment on the Mindset List for an online piece he was writing. We declined. The piece was published in November as “The Mindset List is Taking Marketers Inside the Minds of Future Generations.”

Here is the first two paragraphs:

Each year, brand executives from all over the globe pore over a simple collection of facts compiled by a trio of researchers at a small Midwestern liberal arts college. Their work, known as the Mindset List, has been incorporated into sales presentations and customer relations policies.

It’s a map for marketers, which can capture the precise moment the recent past becomes the distant past, and suggest a path toward the future.

I can believe the part about the BML being incorporated into sales presentations because its brand of fact-free hokum seems like a good match for the advertising industry. But does anyone in marketing take the BML seriously? Don’t they have the skills needed to look up when things happened in relation to when people were born? Brooke provides no evidence that anyone in marketing finds the list useful so perhaps this introduction is just more marketing puffery.

The article repeats many of the familiar canards about the BML. One of the things I didn’t know (or had forgotten) is that “In the past, the authors have helped put together specific Mindset Lists for African-Americans, Mumbaikars, New Zealanders and Jamaicans.” I have yet to find those online, but if anyone has a copy of any of these, please send them our way.

Beloit Mindlessness is described by Brooke as coming “via WordPress” as though our use of a popular content management system bears on our arguments. I don’t know what to make of that. Is there a more authoritative software package we should adopt?

McBride’s response to criticism, as we’re heard before, is that “the list was never intended to be anything beyond a conversation starter,” which essentially undercuts all the highfalutin claims earlier in the article about its precision.

What’s the Deal with Tom McBride?

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In anticipation of the new Mindset List being unveiled Tuesday, I thought I’d look over some of the stuff the Mindset gang has put out since last August. While Ron Nief and Charles Westerberg apparently have other things going on, Tom McBride seems committed to sharing all of his half-baked thoughts with the world. A quick round-up of items by McBride:

  • Mindset lists for Baby Boomers and Generation X, both of which have the same low quality and lack of insight as the annual lists.
  • A bizarre screed titled “Is The Mindset List a White Colonial Plot Against Yoko Ono?” It has to be read to be believed. Apparently, a student in a class on “Critical Identity Studies” at a “liberal arts college” (Beloit?) made a poster critiquing this BML item: “A significant other who is a bit ‘too Yoko Ono’ has always created tension.” McBride accuses the poor student of “McCarthysim” and “guilt-by-association,” and calls the poster “defective, anti-intellectual work—an effort of sophomoric propaganda.”
  • A history of sex titled The Great American Lay. Clearly McBride is up on the latest slang.
  • Weird, fact-free video rants (each posted at least twice on the BML Facebook page). In the strangest, titled “American society is meaningless. Thank God!”, McBride claims that in “modern societies” “we are largely disease-free and pain-free”(!) and, thus, “meaningless.” “Meaningless societies are generally successful societies,” he declares.

I’m sure the Internet is filled with low-quality social analysis along these lines, but it’s sad that McBride couldn’t have used ownership of the Mindset List to produce something more worthwhile.

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

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Presidents have always been denied line item veto power. (Class of 2020, #44)

This complete failure of an item checks the usual sad Mindset List boxes:

1. It refers to something that happened roughly 18 years ago.

2. Very few 18-year-olds are aware of it.

3. It has nothing to do with their “mindset.”

4. The item suggests some important change in society—but only if you’re as ignorant of the topic as the Mindset gang is. (Presidents in the U.S. have never had the line-item veto power—although they seemed to have it between Congress passing the Line Item Veto Act of 1996 and the Supreme Court striking it down in 1998.)

5. It’s not even something that will make its readers feel old because it isn’t a noteworthy historical event.