The Annual Beloit College Mindless Mindset List

Last year the Annoyed Librarian took on this annual rite of the late summer season. A couple of excerpts:

It's unfortunately that time of the year again. For 11 years now, as the academic year begins, you can count on Beloit College to come up with another one of their Mindless Lists to tell us dull and trivial things they think are relevant to understanding the incoming freshman class. I still can't figure out either who the audience is for this or if any of it is even remotely relevant, but apparently we academics are supposed to take this list and meditate on how these kids today are so different from you and me.

For example, this year's Mindless List starts off by saying: "Most of the students entering College this fall, members of the Class of 2011, were born in 1989. For them, Alvin Ailey, Andrei Sakharov, Huey Newton, Emperor Hirohito, Ted Bundy, Abbie Hoffman, and Don the Beachcomber have always been dead."

Huey Newton? Abbie Hoffman? Who's given any thought to them for 30 years? I guess the audience is supposed to be all the aging hippies who are now professors about to retire. I hate to break it to the aging hippies, but these people were history even when I started college, whenever that was. ...

The only lesson we learn from the Mindless Lists is that the compilers think we're all fools who will try to communicate with 18-year-olds as if they were 50. When I used to teach, instead of referencing popular culture, I always made sure to sprinkle my discussions with references to historians or philosophers or poets, and occasionally a classic movie or composer, not to show off, but to show the students there was another world, a broad cultural world, outside of the limited domain of their knowledge.

Perhaps instead of pap about Pete Rose, the Mindless List could include things like: "For them, Beethoven is a movie about a big dog. Why don't we try to teach these kids something?"