Beloit College Mindset List

KEPPELER: It's not the years — really

When I really want to exacerbate that feeling, I check out the Beloit College Mindset List (www.beloit.edu/mindset), which details the worldview of students entering college any given year since 1998. It was created to remind college faculty about references students just won’t get, and still exists to make those of us who’ve long said farewell to those days feel absolutely ancient.

The Mindset List - Beloit College

Welcome to the Beloit College Mindset List.

The Mindset List was created at Beloit College in 1998 to reflect the world view of entering first year students. It started with the members of the class of 2002, born in 1980.

What started as a witty way of saying to faculty colleagues "watch your references," has turned into a globally reported and utilized guide to the intelligent if unprepared adolescent consciousness. It is requested by thousands of readers, reprinted in hundreds of print and electronic publications, and used for a wide variety of purposes. It immediately caught the imagination of the public, and in the ensuing years, has drawn responses from around the world. This site now gets more than a million hits a year.

The site contains all of the lists and news about the list’s development. There are also opportunities to provide feedback and to get information on authors Ron Nief and Tom McBride.

New to the site is information about the publication of The Mindset Lists of American History: From Typewriters to Text Messages, What Ten Generations of Americans Think is Normal , published by John Wiley and Sons (July, 2011).

Contact information is here for the authors and you can follow the conversations and share your ideas and stories either at the Mindset List Facebook page or at www.mindsetmoment.com .

We look forward to hearing from you.               Tom McBride and Ron Nief

See the Mindset List for the Class of 2014

See the Beloit College Mindset List webcast (viewable in the Microsoft Silverlight player)

About the Authors:

Tom McBride is a professor of English and Keefer Professor of the Humanities at Beloit College. A graduate of Baylor University and the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign, he teaches Milton, Shakespeare, and critical theory and has team-taught many interdisciplinary courses. He is a co-founder of the program in Rhetoric and Discourse in the English department and for many years headed the college’s First-Year Initiatives seminar program. He has published critical essays and creative non-fiction in journals as diverse as Texas Studies in Language and Literature, The Baker Street Journal, and Two Cities, and on britannica.com and open democracy.net. He has been a commentator on language for Wisconsin Public Radio and is known on campus for the twice-yearly Keefer Lectures.