The Mindset List® has moved to a new home, and it’s one of the best and most innovative colleges in the land. To say we’re psyched is no hyperbole! For more please go here: https://www.marist.edu/-/marist-news-marist-to-take-lead-on-iconic-mindset-list-in-2019 Tom McBride, Ron Nief, Charles Westerberg
THE FIRST MAN TO PUT AMERICA FIRST Charles Lindbergh’s Plot to Make America Great Agai By Tom McBride Charles Lindbergh never said he wanted to Make America Great Again. But he did say, as does the current American president, that he wanted to put America First.He may well have plotted to make America great again, but he never said it out loud. This was seventy-eight years ago. Time has been rude to Lindbergh. Recently the author of a new book about him (Robert Zorn) discovered, in an airport discussion, that Millennials had never heard of Charles Lindbergh. Yet once he was world-famous as an almost sublimely pioneering aviator. He was prominent in the America First Committee. The year of the Read on »
JOURNEY: How to Nintendofy The Gen Z Classr Tom McBride Remarks For the Southern Regional Education Board (10/2018 Whenever older people teach younger people, as happens every day all over the world, there will be a communications gap. One part of this chasm occurs when the older party, the teacher, assumes knowledge that the younger party doesn’t have. It’s an old principle of learning that we gain new knowlede based on what we already know. So in the 1970s, if students knew about the Watergate scandal, teachers could use that knowledge to teach about Shakespeare’s Richard the Third. The analogies shed light on both Richard Nixon and Richard the Third alike. But nowadays students do not Read on »
EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE TUESDAY, AUGUST 21 Author contacts: Ron Nief (608-770-2625) niefr@beloit.edu Tom McBride (608-312-9508) mcbridet@beloit.edu Charles Westerberg (608-225-8100) westerbc@beloit.edu The New Millennium Belongs to This Year’s Entering College Class of 2022 in The 21st Annual Mindset List Human beings have always been living — not just traveling — in space. The United States has always been in Afghanistan. Same-sex marriage has always been legal somewhere and the once revolutionary “You’ve got mail” is almost forgotten. A lot can change in just 18 years, but these same 18 years also make up the mindset—or “event horizon”—of today’s entering college students. Born in 2000, the first year of the new millennium, these students are members of the College Read on »
Farewell to the Dorm MINDSET LIST® Remarks Delivered to the Interface Student Housing Conference, Austin, Texas, April 6, 2018 The Mindset List® thanks Mr. Bruce Sanders of Elauwit for inviting us to speak today. Over half a century ago I began my college life in what was called a dormitory, at a university about ninety miles northwest of Austin. Though we did not appreciate it at the time, we were herded like the proverbial cattle into a four-story building with the same-sized rooms, sparsely furnished with standard issue university desks, tables, and beds. We ate the same food, prepared in advance for us, all in the same place. We had communal bathrooms—none of us even had our own stall, Read on »
Beloit College Releases the Mindset List for This Year’s Entering Class of First-Year College Students, The Class of 2021 Beloit, Wis. —This year’s entering college class of 2021 can’t remember when a “phone” wasn’t a video game and research library. Mostly born in 1999, they’ve always been searching for Pokemon. They’ve never read a Peanuts strip that wasn’t a repeat and they never had the privilege of a Montgomery Ward catalogue as a booster seat. They have persevered in a world without Joe Dimaggio and brightened by emojis. If you ask them about the whine of a dial-up modem, expect a blank stare. These are among the items in this year’s Beloit College Mindset List, the 20th such release since Read on »
THE MINDSET LIST® OF GENERATION X Tom McBride Most Gen Xers are now between 37 and 53. Partly because they have been deemed, by demographers, to have had only a sixteen-year run, their numbers are small. But they were also born during a time of low birth rates compared to those of the later 40s and the 1950s. The reasons are many: the Pill, divorce, more women working out of the home, and perhaps access to abortion. One commentator has called Gen Xers America’s neglected middle child. Thanks to the death rate, Millennials have now taken over Boomers as the largest generational cohort. There are about 75 million Millennials and more than ten million fewer Gen Xers. But by 2028 Read on »
A significant other who is a bit “too Yoko Ono” has always created tension. A partner too hard to handle…hard for your friends to compete with perfection Comment: The Anti-Mindset poster is a project in a course on “Critical Identity Studies,” the aim of which is to “explore mass media’s relationships to structures of power that…police ideologies.” An earlier part of the course description identifies these ideologies as the usual ones about class, gender, and race, and students are given an assignment to find manifestations of local “colonialisms” (sic) in the local community. Given this course description and assignment, what are we to make of the Anti-Mindset Poster? Here is an educated guess. The poster features three smiling (self-satisfied?) white Read on »