Blog Archives

Tom McBride and Ron Nief called them “Mindset Moments.” They are the settings in which you have made a witty point or perceptive observation, yet you have been met with blank stares. The message is clear that your inciteful observation has fallen flat. And your audience doesn’t know what you are talking about. These “moments” provided the impetus, 25 years ago, when Tom and I were still of sound mind at Beloit College, for the creation of the Mindset List and several books. It was a list we shared initially with faculty colleagues and, eventually, with audiences around the world with the warning:                           BEWARE OF HARDENING OF THE REFERENCES. An intriguing setting for these Mindset Moments today has come   Read on »

THE TEENS-TURN-50 LIST Today’s New College Kiss in Thirty Years BY Tom McBride (mcbridet@beloit.edu) And Ron Nief (niefr@beloit.edu) Today’s high school graduates will have their adjustments cut out for them as we confront a period of sometimes wrenching change. As they set a course in life, they might well consider that in the next 30 years, as they approach middle age, they will find that…. 1 India will be the most populated country in the world.  2 Populations in Europe will be old, those in Africa, young, and the populations of Canada and other northern tier countries will have doubled and tripled. 3 Covid will have been forgotten as climate change, forcing people and animals to live closer and closer   Read on »

It’s difficult to unteach old dogs old tricks, and this applies particularly to the creators of The Mindset List, Tom McBride (mcbridet@beloit.edu) and Ron Nief (niefr@beloit.edu). Each year about this time we just naturally start thinking about the world we know and how it compares to the world of this year’s high school graduates preparing to head off to college, voting booths, and other great adventures. Their’s is a different world from their mentors and even from those just a few years older. Therefore, we offer a few of our thoughts drawn from… THE 18-ER FILE If you were born in 2004 and turned 18 in 2022, THEN: You may be the last generation to prefer reality to the metaverse. You are   Read on »

04/23/2023: What Might Confucius Say About the Trans-Gender Controversy? During a recent debate in the Montana State legislature, the gathered senators refused to acknowledge the body’s one trans-gender member, who represents 11,000 people in her district. Most of the members are anti-LGBTQ rights and felt that those who uphold these rights should not be called upon even if they have their hands up and are duly elected. In this context, some might think that they who would call upon the member for her remarks are “progressives” or “radicals” or “liberals.”  But what if they are actually CONSEERVATIVES? Confucius and his followers have said, “Review the past in order to create the future.” What is the conservative (past) wisdom of acknowledging   Read on »

09/20/2023: What ARE the Sounds of Silence Anyhow? Simon and Garfunkel’s famed song, “The Sounds of Silence,” illustrate a tricky problem. The idea of “silence” as a “sound” would seem to be a contradiction, but if a car backfiring is a sound, then its contrast of total quiet would also, by comparison, be a “sound,” too. Do we know tings only through opposites? Can we really know love unless we have experienced hatred? Or joy if we have never been sad? There’s a celebrated thought experiment about “Mary” in philosophy. Mary knows everything there is to know, in the abstract, about the color blue, but she has never seen it herself. She has never seen a red-white-and-blue flag, even if   Read on »

The Mindset List for the Graduating High School Class of 1961 Authors note: For more than two decades the Beloit College Mindset List chronicled the experiences and event horizons of 18-year-old students as they entered college. Created by Ron Nief, director of Public Affairs at Wisconsin’s Beloit College and his Beloit College colleague, Prof. of English Tom McBride, the list was distributed internationally each August as the authors traveled the country speaking and doing interviews. It was initially intended as a reminder to those faculty facing first- year students to beware of “hardening of the references.” Over the years it became one of the most quoted “back-to-school” references and was cited by Time Magazine as a part of the “American   Read on »

Dear Boomers and Millennials: We must shed the coronavirus of division and complacency among us. This is your Hopeful Leader speaking. You have been apart, for Millennials feel that capitalism has worked for Boomers but not for them, and that Boomers have gotten the lion’s share of capitalism’s benefits. Meanwhile, Boomers don’t know wy Millennials would rather look at their smart phones than look at them. But that was all before Covid. After Covid the two generations—you young and old alike—can come together. The Generation Gap will have passed, along with the virus itself. What can I say, and how shall I lead, in order to make this come about? First, Covid has taught us that Evil is no respecter   Read on »

Flus Have Always Been Spanish Tom McBride Suppose there had been a Marist Mindset List for the college class of 10440. The first item on the List might have been: “The flu has always been Spanish.” College grads in 1940 were born in 1918, the year of the last COVD-19 scale pandemic in the United States. This was not the coronavirus, which had not yet hatched itself.  It was the Spanish Flu.  President Trump has sometimes called COVD-19 the “Chinese virus” because, he says, it came from China. The Spanish flu, though, didn’t come from Spain. It was so-called because when the flu hit Spain, which was not at war (this was the end of World War I), reports of the   Read on »