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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 Committee’s founding, 1940, Lindbergh was still idolized for his famous solo air journey from New York to Paris thirteen years before. His middle name was Augustus, and for millions he was an august figure indeed, both solitary in the air and, speechifying, on the ground.

In retrospect, the Lindbergh of the 1940s is a profile in dark ruminations, stated in all the fervent diligence that he had been taught as a boy in the upper Middle West. A stoic, aw-shucks Americanism, as seen in Lindbergh’s brief political career, after the start of World War II in Europe but before the attack on Pearl Harbor, emerges as the carrier of fascist potential. Perhaps it was only a mutation of mid-twentieth-century patriotism. But the raw materials for racialist repression were present from the start.

Lindbergh did not issue from a political vacuum. Nor did his followers. Having famously landed in Paris in 1927, he was no Dorothy who just happened to set down in Oz. Instead, he was a political thinker with many followers in Dorothy’s isolationist Kansas. He was hardly alone in his convictions. Many of his countrymen thought of American Jews as urban and foreign—as potentially alien squatters with no fealty to any land. Today we might call them “citizens of the world” and mean it as a compliment, though it would not be thought a compliment, perhaps, by the hyper-Americans of (say) Frankfort, Indiana, certainly not in 1940. (Nor would it have been a compliment more recently to Prime Minister Theresa May, who, promising a hard exit from trans-national Europe, stated that citizens of the world are lamentably citizens of precisely nowhere.) Lindbergh conceded that a very limited number of useful Jews might be good for the United States. Today he might have said that some of them, “I assume, are good people.” There were millions of U.S. citizens who believed in the 30s and 40s that white European races were superior, though few of them could articulate this opinion as well as Lindbergh, who praised, in a grand historical survey, German efficiency and science; British government and commerce; and French understanding of, in his translucent words, “how to live.”

But Lindbergh and others, especially in the Middle West, did not believe that British superiority, for instance, was ideological. It was racial. The British had discovered how to run government for the same reason the Germans discovered how to operate machines: because they were white.

Thus for Charles Lindbergh the real tragedy was not that Germans were killing Semitic Jews, though he wished they wouldn’t. It was that Germans were killing Brits (in the Blitz) and vice-versa. During the 1938 wave of violence against Jews known as Kristallnacht, Lindbergh confided to his diary that he understood Germans had a “difficult” Jewish problem but did not understand why they were dealing with it in such a riotous way. Lindbergh was offended—aesthetically. This didn’t seem like Germany at all. Of course they would do a better job during the Holocaust. By then Lindbergh, banned by Franklin Roosevelt from flying combat missions in the war, was doing so on the sly, but against Japan, not Hitler.

America Firsters, which included the young Kingman Brewster, future and revered president of Yale (he later recanted) were isolationists. It is vital to know why they (not all of them) were such: not only because they were in the middle of the country and felt secure from attack from overseas and saw no need to pick fights with nations that could otherwise never get at them. It was also because they, like Lindbergh, felt that America was no mongrel race but a lovely blend of the best (German, English, French) that augured greater white genius than even the Europeans had displayed. One does not wish to sully or dilute this unparalleled racial ingenuity. One wants to isolate it; let it thrive. One does not wish to kill it off by interfering in a tragic civil war between Nordic types in Europe.

Let the American farmers in Kentucky and Indiana not fight Germans but stay home and breed. They could do little better for America than that.

To be comprehensive and fair, many Americans also felt the U.S. entrance into World War I (The Great War) had been a horrendous squandering of time and treasure. The world was to be made safe for democracy, and yet now the Europeans were at it again. This time, the United States should stay out. If Lindbergh was a racialist, he was also a peacenik! Lindbergh and his ilk, and even those who did not agree with him about Jews, vowed “no more stupid wars.”

Lindbergh is not to be condemned for wanting peace. It is why he wanted it, and for what ends, that besmirch his historical repute. This was rather evident even at the time. Roosevelt confided to aides that, since he might die at any time, he needed to say something: that he thought Lindbergh was a Nazi. This could be viewed as a self-serving remark, because Roosevelt thought America should fight Hitler (the sooner the better) while Lindbergh did not. Yet a review of the historical record does bear Roosevelt out to this extent: Lindbergh, at least pre-December 7, 1941, would likely rather have had the Nazis win than sully America’s Caucasiann greatness by interfering with combat in Europe.

For Lindbergh democracy was nice, but race was nicer. Lindbergh himself had come from the upper Middle West of a Scandinavian family. His father (C.A.L., Senior) had been a Minnesota Congressman of isolationist enthusiasm long before. Lindbergh, Jr. was a loner—he had flown to Paris famously as the “Lone Eagle”—and he remained an intensely solitary (and even secretive) man until his death in the early 1970s. He hated the American culture of chaotic celebrity exposure, in which he himself was trapped, both before and after the infamous kidnapping and murder of his first son, and believed that the United States, awash in trivia and foreign/urban values, had lost its way and was tossing away its greatness, as he himself might have tossed away excess weight on the skyway to Paris. But that shedding was necessary and technical. This one was cultural and tragic.

He thought America could use a cleaning of some type and admired Hitler for the heroic sanitation and efficiency he had brought to Germany. (Nazi propaganda films depicted Jews as vermin: a public health problem.) He had even thought of living there; and Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, offered to design and build his family a house, perhaps brutally spacious (we might conjecture) but also highly functional. It might well have been something Lindbergh would admire. One of Lindbergh’s French friends finally dissuaded him. It would be unwise if not immoral, he admonished. Not everyone loved Hitler and many thought that, in time, he would maybe even cause millions of deaths in stupid wars.

It is likely that Lindbergh was sincere, even decently comported, if also stubborn and racialist. Like most reactionary thinkers, he had a Golden Age to which he cleaved with all his might. For Lindbergh this was probably “before Jews and coloreds and cities.” Lindbergh’s boyhood in Minnesota was a paradise of pristine rural beauty, sandy hills and prairies and unspoiled lakes, and the sacred obligations that citizens of small and homogenous towns tend to honor. It is highly unlikely that Sinclair Lewis, who won a Nobel Prize satirizing the provincialism of just such places, would have been the Lone Lucky Lindy’s favorite author. To bring back such an august age of time’s sylvan past, Lindbergh wanted Germany to fight the Soviets, not Britain and surely not the United States of America. But he did say that, once Communism was done, Russia might become a useful American ally. Was he unwittingly predicting 2018? .

To give Lindbergh his due one must note that he did not believe he was plotting against America, for “America” is one of Wittgenstein’s family resemblance words, whose meaning depends on its particular use. What did America mean to Lindbergh such that he thought he was not scheming against it but trying to save it? It was not the America of liberal democracy but of ethnic purity. This is complex. Lindbergh was not opposed to liberal democracy and must have thought it was a good venue by which the genius of white Europeans could be promoted. But if it brings alien forces, then it must be adjusted. It is not that Lindbergh admired democracy less but that he liked Western European white heritage more. Here again the Lone Eagle did not fly alone. This was a time when millions of Americans worried that Italian immigrants were not truly white and that those whose last names end in a long vowel are not entirely to be trusted. .

For Lindbergh the real plotters against America were American Jews, who wanted to get America into war against the Nazis (perhaps because he thought their bankers had invested in munitions), and the British, who wished the same result. Lindbergh stated publicly in Des Moines that the plot against America was a conspiracy by Jews, whom he had never much liked, and the British, for whom he now tempered his approval. In his diary he admitted that he could not entirely blame either the Jews or the British for trying to serve their own self-interests and survival. But then he glides into the subject of History itself, in which he had a keen and rather “scientific” interest. “Peace,” he averred, is a virgin that dares not show her face to the world without the shield of “Strength.” This was a law of History. But there was at least one other. Lindbergh said to his uncritical journal that he regretted the German invasion of Poland, but that Germany was only doing what would soon become normal for all. He went on to say that right and wrong is one thing in the eyes of the law but quite another in the eyes of History. Add to Lindbergh’s suspicions of democracy and his admiration of white nativism a dose of pop Darwinism, and a sizable dash of historical determinism.

Charles Lindbergh was made in America. His roots go back to Thomas Jefferson, who manifested major American contradictions. Author of a great short statement propounding equality under the law, he also owned slaves. Prophetic about slavery knifing the country in half, his worries about “a fire bell in the night” did not prevent him from owning and coupling with slaves. While he expressed the founding principles of liberal democracy in universal terms—the right of all to pursue liberty and happiness—he also thought the essential goodness of the American experiment was to be found much more locally in its self-sufficient farmers. He was suspicious of larger cities and too-accessible credit and national bankers alike. He lived in a time when there were fewer people in the entire country than now live in Greater New York City. Might he not have agreed with Noel Coward: “The higher the buildings, the lower the morals.” For Jefferson American democracy was uniquely supported by the blend of roughhewn individualism and communal obligation found on its farms.

Lindberg was also a rural idealist. A celebrity who got multiple ticker tape parades in America’s great cities, he remained a man of the Heartland. Unlike Jefferson, he did live to see the great teeming and polyglot cities. Unlike Jefferson, he lived to discover an ethnically cleansed pseudo-Darwinism that fused well with his love of small town America. He lived out the principles of liberal democracy—he, like his arch-nemesis the Committee to Save the Democracies, vied for public opinion, hearts and minds. Whatever President Roosevelt’s suspicions of him might have been, he never thought he was treasonous to America—not his America anyhow. And that’s the real America, the great one. Others just might enemies of the decent people.

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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 know much about the Watergate scandal, so that strategy is out of date.

The most important source of miscommunication, however, is not a teacher’s “hardening of the references.” Instead, it’s that teachers and professors bring to the classroom a different form of cognitive conditioning. There are many things about Millennials and Gen Z that are good to know, but one of the most important is this: By the age of 21 hey have spent over seven thousand hours on video games. They have spent only two thousand hours reading. What are teachers and professors supposed to do with this fact?

It will hardly do to turn a course in sociology or chemistry into a video game. The Super Mario Brothers Approach to Shakespeare’s Sonnets seems absurd. It’s a nice idea to turn classrooms into fun, but let’s not be ridiculous, right?

Yet the video game factor, or the Nintendo factor, will not go away. So how can teachers in the classroom adapt to it? The Mindset List team has already written a short book, The Millennial Promise, which identifies all kinds of teaching strategies. We urge all teachers to use it. It has 40 tips. But in this short piece, right now, you’ll find a practical guide for how to “Nintendofy” the Gen Z Classroom.

• Always keep in mind that any course, as with video games, is a journey. And this means that, as with any journey, certain emotions need to be noted and engaged, such as curiosity, do-ability, safety, fear, and confidence. Students who take your course want to know why it is valuable for them to do so, whether or not they can learn the material, what chances they have for do-overs if they mess up, and what the progressive steps of the course are going to entail. And this means that you, as instructor, need to dramatize the importance of the course, lay out in clear “preview steps” the adventure to come, and clarify the means of evaluation and the possibility of second chances. Create a buzz around your course–but also communicate direction, challenge, and confidence. If your course is too simple, it will be boring. If it’s too hard, it will be defeating.

Look to the sweet spot, the middle ground: all the video games that have beem popular have found this mid-point between complexity and achievement, motivation and challenge.

• Emphasize and define growth, another video game feature. It is essential to lay out, in full, the means and ends of academic growth. Just as video games have taken these students through several levels, you too should define what the plateaus in our course will be. For instance, you might point out, if you are a sociologist, that the course will entail four stages of growth: learning what social facts are; learning how social facts are established and researched; learning the work of the great practitioners in this field; and learning how to observe and research social facts in your own environment. In other words: 1. Workable Definition, 2. Research Methods, 3. Historical Examples, and 4.Applied Imagination. Different instructors will want to develop their own growth templates.

But do develop one, preview it, stick to it, and review it often in class. This will accord with the cognitive patterns your students have grown up with.

• Make the materials dramatic. Video games are dramatic. They involve characters in conflict. They humanize forces. So when you introduce particular thinkers in your field, you should try to personalize them. Put their ideas into dialogue of concord and dispute with each other. This can even apply to concepts. Richard Dawkins, long before video games, called genes “selfish.” It was a figure of speech of course, but it turned out to be a vivid and best-selling way of explanation.

Games are conflictive, and that’s what makes them enticing. Gamify the chemistry, philosophy, or psychology you teach.

• Nurture feedback. Video games are popular because they permit and encourage frequent response. Current students are like sensitive thermostats, alert constantly to changes in the environment and the need to adjust to them. They are a “how am I doing generation,” and a teacher may find this exasperating or adapt to it. The latter option is productive. This means taking time out to identify what is not clear to the class; what class members are curious about and wish to consider further; and what may lie ahead.

There is limited classroom time, so one professorial challenge is making minutes for this sort of thing and maximizing its benefits without allowing it to soak up too many hours.

• Focus on retrieval. Another video game element: the retrieval of past information and skills in order to progress to higher ground. Teachers can promote the art of retrieval in several different ways. One is to offer a mini-presentation on how the retrieval of this or that concept will be essential if students are to go on to the next one. Another is more informal: taking ten minutes at the beginning of class to ask students what, in their view, they most need to remember in order to perform the coming week’s tasks, and why. Here’s another: ask them to word-process their understanding of a concept that was covered a few weeks back. This will give them an informed sense, a self-feedback, of what they are recalling and how well. Once they put keyboard to screen they will quickly be amazed at how much they do comprehend or how much they need to review.

Again, the idea is that the course is like a video game expedition, and that means often bringing out the “map” and showing how a memory of a previous stop will be helpful in grasping the next one.

• Structure both community and competition. Both of these are video game features, as players form communities of rivalry. Along the journey of the course, have students work in cooperative but competitive teams, and one of the most useful rivalries involves striving for economy of statement.

A student’s capacity to express an idea in concise language is one key to her understanding. Excess verbiage is the foe of clarity, and sometimes it is also a way by which students try to hide their misinformation and incomprehension (a.k.a. bullshit). So: compose the class into four teams and assign each team the following task: To express a complex idea in a statement no longer than a Tweet. Then put the competing “Twitter Theses” under discussion and assessmen. The goal is to break down a complicated idea into as few and simple words as possible without discarding any essential complexity or nuance.

This is just one idea. Having teams debate the controversies of the course is another one. Competing team-designed websites is yet another.

The idea is to create a an exciting academic environment and a functional community/competition milieu at the same time.

For MUCH MORE check out The Millennial Promise: 40 Tips for the New Classroom. It’s available in hard copy or Kindle HERE: 

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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 21^st 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 Class of 2022.

Since 1998, the annual Mindset List has circulated internationally as a way of reminding professors everywhere that they aren’t just teaching courses, they’re also teaching students. The list has generated several books, prompted international discussions and lists and scores of speaking appearances around the country.

“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.

The list was initiated in the early days of the internet and has been a popular component of back-to-school talks, faculty orientations and sermons for two decades. Its uses have ranged from training police and military officers and sales staff at Neiman Marcus, to the late Fidel Castro’s attacks on U.S. policy.

“With contributions from parents and academics around the world, the List has tracked cultural change, stimulated intergenerational conversation, and just made older people feel even older,” noted co-editors Tom McBride, author and Beloit emeritus professor of English, and Charles Westerberg, Beloit College sociologist.

The original authors have moved on to new projects in their retirement but will continue their battle against “hardening of the references” at their website, themindsetlist.com.

“Students come to college with particular assumptions based on the horizons of their lived experience,” McBride notes. “All teachers need to monitor their references, while students need to appreciate that without a sound education they will never get beyond the cave of their own limited personal experiences,”

The 2018 Mindset list For the Class of 2022

Among the iconic figures never alive in their lifetime are Victor Borge, Charles Schulz, and the original Obi-Wan Kenobi Alec Guinness.

Among their classmates could be Madonna’s son Rocco, Will Smith’s daughter Willow, or David Bowie and Iman’s daughter Alexandria.

1. They are the first class born in the new millennium, escaping the dreaded label of “Millennial,” though their new designation—iGen, GenZ, etc. — has not yet been agreed upon by them.
2. Outer space has never been without human habitation.
3. They have always been able to refer to Wikipedia.
4. They have grown up afraid that a shooting could happen at their school, too.
5. People loudly conversing with themselves in public are no longer thought to be talking to imaginary friends.
6. Calcutta has always been Kolkata.
7. Afghanistan has always been the frustrating quagmire that keeps on giving.
8. Investigative specials examining the O.J. Simpson case have been on TV annually since their birth.
9. Same-sex couples have always found marital bliss in the Netherlands.
10. When filling out forms, they are not surprised to find more than two gender categories to choose from.
11. Presidential candidates winning the popular vote and then losing the election are not unusual.
12. Parents have always been watching Big Brother, and vice versa.
13. Someone has always skied non-stop down Mount Everest.
14. They’ve grown up with stories about where their grandparents were on 11/22/63 and where their parents were on 9/11.
15. Erin Brockovich has always offered a role model.
16. The wordsveritas and horizon have always been joined together to form Verizon.
17. They will never fly TWA, Swissair, or Sabena airlines.
18. The Tower of Pisa has always had a prop to keep it leaning.
19. There has never been an Enron.
20. The Prius has always been on the road in the U.S.
21. UK retail sales have always been organized in metrics, except for beer, still sold by the imperial pint.
22. They never used a spit bowl in a dentist’s office.
23. They have never seen a cross-town World Series.
24. There has always been a Survivor.
25. “You’ve got mail” would sound as ancient to them as “number, please” would have sounded to their parents.
26. Mifepristone or RU-486, commonly called the “abortion pill,” has always been available in the U.S.
27. A visit to a bank has been a rare event.
28. Unable to come up with a new tune, Russians have always used the old Soviet national anthem.
29. They have never had to deal with “chads,” be they dimpled, hanging, or pregnant.
30. “Bipartisan” is soooo last century.
31. Horton has always heard a Who on stage in Seussical the musical.
32. Robert Downey Jr. has always been the sober Iron Man.
33. Exotic animals have always been providing emotional support to passengers on planes.
34. Starbucks has always served venti Caffè Lattes in Beijing’s Forbidden City.
35. Lightbulbs have always been shatterproof.
36. Xlerators have always been drying hands in 15 seconds with a roar.
37. I Love You has always been a computer virus.
38. Thumbprints have always provided log in security—and are harder to lose—than a password.
39. Robots have always been able to walk on two legs and climb stairs.
40. None having served there, American Presidents have always visited Vietnam as Commander-in-Chief.
41. There have always been space tourists willing to pay the price.
42. Mass market books have always been available exclusively as Ebooks.
43. Oprah has always been a magazine.
44. Berets have always been standard attire for U.S. military uniforms.
45. The folks may have used a Zipcar to get them to the delivery room on time.
46. Bonefish Grill has always been serving sustainable seafood.
47. As toddlers, they could be fined for feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square in London.
48. Google Doodles have never recognized major religious holidays.
49. Chernobyl has never produced any power in their lifetimes.
50. Donny and Marie who?
51. They never tasted Pepsi Twist in the U.S.
52. Denmark and Sweden have always been just a ten-minute drive apart via the Oresund Bridge.
53. There have always been more than a billion people in India.
54. Thanks to the Taliban, the colossal Buddhas of Bamiyan have never stood in Central Afghanistan.
55. Films have always been distributed on the Internet.
56. Environmental disasters such as the BP Deepwater Horizon, and the coal sludge spill in Martin City, Ky., have always exceeded the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
57. The detachable computer mouse is almost extinct.
58. The Mir space station has always been at the bottom of the South Pacific.
59. King Friday the 13thand Lady Elaine Fairchild have always dwelled in the Neighborhood, but only in re-runs.
60. Israeli troops have never occupied Southern Lebanon.

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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, much less our own bathroom. Women lived in totally separate facilities and were allowed only grudgingly into ours. There was a TV lounge, with exactly one television set. There were study lounges at both ends of each floor.

There are a couple of notable things to observe about my experience, which was quite typical in its time and even somewhat typical for most of the last half of the twentieth century.

First, we were saying goodbye to living at home. We were going from having the run of our parents’ house to confinement to a single room. We could no longer raid the fridge for a snack, though it was admittedly good to get free of Mom and Dad at long last.

Second, our individuality was thwarted. While we certainly had ways to assert our own uniqueness, the living space was not encouraging. We all had the same room and the same beds. We had to struggle a little bit in order to make a uniform living space “ours,” and there was a limit to what we could do. It mostly entailed what we were able to put up on the walls, but if we ruined the walls doing so, we’d have to pay a fine. This could be a stiff price to pay for the luxury of looking at a Mams and Papas poster.

But, as anyone can tell you, that was a long time ago, informed by a wholly different mindset. It was back in what we should call The Age of the Dormitory. The grandparents of today’s students probably still use the word “dormitory” to refer to college housing, while their parents might use the slightly less outmoded term “residence hall.” But both terms are fast going the way of such phrases as “personnel director” and “maternity ward.” We know that the world of the dorm is rapidly ending. We know that today’s budget-conscious and consumer-minded Millennials want something different: their own apartments within walking distance of the university. Their own bathrooms, and lots and lots of storage space, are essential. So are nearby shops and restaurants and the other accouterments of the urban experience. Many Millennials are happy to live with even up to three other people as long as they have their own privacy. They will sooner pay more money for a place with interesting furniture and top quality amenities than they will pay for a cheap-o place without such amenities. Unlike their parents’ generation, they’re not into authenticity and grunge. A place with balky Wi-Fi or cell tower reception is an absolute no-no. Some amenities are optional, but according to a Houston research firm they will pay up to around two hundred dollars more a month for such extras as a big fridge or dedicated parking or fitness center.

Note the differences from fifty years ago. Today’s college students don’t want, and will not tolerate, a major discontinuity between their life at home and their life at university. They want continuity with that life, but this is not some Peter Pan thing. It’s not that they don’t want to grow up. It’s that they want something different from previous generations’ preferences in their living lifestyle. And they are eager to find ways to assert their own individualism: their own bathrooms and bedrooms, their own special kind of Pumpkin lattes around the corner, and their own ability to be eccentric within urban settings where everybody is a little eccentric.

It just isn’t your father’s dormitory any more. That’s going the way of your father’s Olds. They aren’t making them any longer.

Now we know that these developments are powerfully driven by economics. Universities can save money by outsourcing student housing; and students have discovered that when you get control of your own lifestyle off-campus, it’s sometimes cheaper than living on campus, and a lot more interesting, too. This has opened up a lucrative market for construction. But I want to take the balance of my time to describe the cultural factors that have led us to this trend. It’s not just the economy. It’s also, as we are fond of saying about the 2016 election, the cultural mindset, and we aren’t called The Mindset List for nothing.

So what are the major cultural traits of these Millennials—Gen Y and Gen Z—living in these places?

NARCISSISM. First, their much-described narcissism needs to be put into context. They have been characterized as coddled and spoiled. They’ve been called the “Trophy Kids,” who got a trophy just for participating and not for winning anything. But every young generation is so described by the older generation. It’s a meme that just won’t go away. It’s built into the tensions between old and young. It’s quite true that young people, in reasonably prosperous times, are self-involved, and why not? They are trying to find themselves in the world. It’s not as though Baby Boomers and Gen Xers walked barefoot through the snow in order to help the poor. And even if they are rather narcissistic, that does not mean that they are not also worried about debt and extremely skeptical of free I-Pads in order to get them to move into college apartment X as opposed to college apartment Y. It is possible to be “narcissistic” and budget-conscious and thrifty at the same time.

URBANITY. Second, they are very much an urban directed generation. They want to live in big cities because that’s where the jobs are—they do not plan on being the factory accountant in Kokomo, Indiana and raise a family there, because there are no factory accountants in Kokomo any more. They like cities because they can travel light there: no car is required, and now they can get anywhere with Uber or (more politically correct) Lyft. They like cities because they are meaningful consumers. They are looking for just the right product for them in terms of affordability and personal expression. You can only find these in big cities and on Amazon. But Amazon is just an on-line extension of the urban experience. And so if they want to “practice” the urban experience in an off-campus housing arrangement with the apartment buildings on one side and the latte shops and Turkish restaurants on the other side, well, as someone once said: for those who like that sort of thing, that’s the sort of thing they like.

SANITY GLAMOUR. Third, they have grown up with a kind of glamorous cleanliness, especially as manifested by clean, lovely websites (perhaps their own); sleek and super clear TV and tablet screens; and word processors where you never have to get your hands black changing the ribbon. And they are looking for this same chic, sanitary glamor in their living arrangements. They are looking for authentic slumming not so much.

TOLERANCE. Fourth, they are a fairly open-minded generation. Again, we should not assume that they can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. They can be self-centered and tolerant. They have grown up with intercultural and gender differences as normal, especially in the media and on cable and Youtube and streaming. This gets us back to the urban experience again, as there is obviously more acceptance of tran-genders in Boston than there is in Clear Lake, Iowa. And so in many ways the end of the dorm is, again, the adoption of urban experience, with a premium put on consumerist diversity, inclusiveness of different types of people, and even a certain aloneness—what sociologists used to call urban alienation. But they’ll take it as the price for working on their individuality.

SKEPTICISM ABOUT INSTITUTIONS. Fifth, they are not institutional-minded, for a couple of reasons. They have grown up in a world where you can avoid the middleman of institutions (look at how direct media exposure has bypassed the power of political parties to choose candidates; and look at how Amazon has replaced the middle man big box stores and how Wikipedia has replaced the on-campus reference librarian—another middle man now bypassed). And this generation has seen institutions fail—to stop 9/11; to get Iraqi intelligence right; and to head off the Great Recession. So off-campus living, besides being less costly, is a way by which they can diminish, to some extent, the institutional grip of the university.

RELATIVE SEXLESSNESS. Sixth, they are not having sex as often as previous generations did. Demographers have different theories about why this is so. Please let me say, in general, that they spend about a third of their time on digital media; and while many older Americans think this is far too much, it is equally true that if they are on line or “on phone” they are spending time that previous generations could use for driving past the speed limit or having sex. It is difficult to shoplift or have sexual congress while texting at the same time. And many of them are canny enough to know that their professional careers depend on their being able to work with the opposite sex in more impersonal ways, as the human resources managers will tell them. This is a generation in which Platonic friendship between men and women is extremely common, and this is also why multi-gendered living arrangements, especially off campus, are becoming more typical.

These are the features of a different mindset from 50 or even 20 years ago. It must be added, though, that some things don’t change. Universities still want their students’ out of classroom experiences to be educational: to be daily processes of listening and tolerance, learning from others who are different, and working to release each other’s creativity. How space can be designed to make this sort of thing happen more productively is a separate subject, but the general educational mission of the college is much the same, for better or worse, as it was years ago.

To sum up: the end of the dorm has been motored by economics, yes; but also by a new generation

*Highly individualized

*Urban in outlook

*Driven by an aesthetic of sanitary glamour

*Suspicious of communal institutions

*Budget-minded even as they are also skeptical about their consumer decisions

*Flexible and open-minded (if also narcissistic and self-involved) and

*Directed towards pre-professional Platonism in their relationships with the opposite sex.

Someday historians of American social life will try to determine the precise mix of economic and cultural factors that ended the age of the dormitory. The interactions between money and mindsets will be, for them as it is for us, a fascinating and complex subject. I have tried to outline some of the cultural elements that have led us to where we are today: off-campus, within walking distance to the lab, with lots of storage space and your own toilet. And for those in the business of building and managing such residences, it helps to know the mindset of the customer. –Tom McBride for the Mindset List®

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 the list was first compiled in 1998. The List’s current subjects are the last class to be born in the 1900s – the last of the Millennials.

The Beloit College Mindset List is created by Ron Nief, Director Emeritus of Beloit College Public Affairs; Tom McBride, Professor Emeritus of English; and Charles Westerberg, Brannon-Ballard Professor of Sociology.

“Members of this class have generally borrowed a lot of money to go to college, so expect them to think of themselves as consumers and not just as students,” said Westerberg, former director of Beloit’s Liberal Arts in Practice Center. “And they will also be concerned not just with what they need to learn but also who they are and to what group they genuinely belong.”

The Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2021  

Students heading into their first year of college this year are mostly 18 and were born in 1999.  Among the iconic figures who have never been alive in their lifetimes are Joe DiMaggio, John F. Kennedy Jr., Walter Payton, and Dusty Springfield.

1. Their classmates could include Eddie Murphy’s Zola and Mel Gibson’s Tommy, or Jackie Evancho singing down the hall.
2. They are the last class to be born in the 1900s, the last of the Millennials —  enter next year, on cue, Generation Z! 
3. They are the first generation for whom a “phone” has been primarily a video game, direction finder, electronic telegraph, and research library.
4. Electronic signatures have always been as legally binding as the pen-on-paper kind.
5. In college, they will often think of themselves as consumers, who’ve borrowed a lot of money to be there.
6. eHarmony has always offered an algorithm for happiness.
7. Peanuts comic strips have always been repeats.
8. They have largely grown up in a floppy-less world.
9. They have never found Mutual Broadcasting or Westinghouse Group W on the radio dial, but XM has always offered radio programming for a fee.
10. There have always been emojis to cheer us up.
11. The Panama Canal has always belonged to Panama and Macau has been part of China.
12. It is doubtful that they have ever used or heard the high-pitched whine of a dial-up modem.
13. They were never able to use a Montgomery Ward catalogue as a booster seat.
14. Donald Trump has always been a political figure, as a Democrat, an Independent, and a  Republican.
15. Zappos has always meant shoes on the Internet.
16. They are the first generation to grow up with Watson outperforming Sherlock.
17. Amazon has always invited consumers to  follow the arrow from A to Z.
18. The folks have always been able to get reward points by paying their taxes to the IRS on plastic.
19. In their lifetimes, Blackberry has gone from being a wild fruit to being a communications device to becoming a wild fruit again.
20. They have always been searching for Pokemon.
21. They may choose to submit a listicle in lieu of an admissions essay.
22. Dora the Explorer and her pet monkey Boots helped to set them on the course of discovery.
23. The seat of Germany’s government has always been back in Berlin.
24. Jet Blue has always been a favorite travel option but the Concorde has been permanently grounded.
25. By the time they entered school, laptops were outselling desktops.
26. There has never been a Coliseum in New York, but there has always been a London Eye on the Thames.
27. Once on campus, they will find that college syllabi, replete with policies about disability, non-discrimination, and learning goals, might be longer than some of their reading assignments.
28. As toddlers they may have dined on some of that canned food hoarded in case of Y2K.
29. An ophthalmologist named Bashar al-Assad has always provided vision for the Syrian military.
30. Whatever the subject, there’s always been a blog for it.
31. S. Supreme Court decisions have always been available at its website.
32. Globalization has always been both a powerful fact of life and a source of incessant protest.
33. One out of four major league baseball players has always been born outside the United States.
34. Carl Sagan has always had his own crater on Mars.
35. A movie scene longer than two minutes has always seemed like an eternity.
36. The Latin music industry has always had its own Grammy Awards.
37. Ketchup has always come in green.
38. They have only seen a Checker Cab in a museum.
39. Men have always shared a romantic smooch on television.
40. They never got to see Jimmy Kimmel and Ben Stein co-host a quiz show or Dennis Miller provide commentary for the NFL.
41. As toddlers, they may have taught their grandparents how to Skype.
42. The image of Sacagawea has always adorned the dollar coin, if you can find one.
43. Having another child has always been a way to secure matching tissue to heal an older sibling.
44. There have always been Latino players on the ice in the NHL.
45. Napster has always been evolving.
46. Nolan Ryan has always worn his Texas Rangers cap in Cooperstown, while Steve Young and Dan Marino have always been watching football from the sidelines.
47. The BBC has always had a network in the U.S. where they speak American.
48. There has never been a sanctioned Texas A&M bonfire.
49. There has always been a Monster in their corner when looking for a job.
50. Wikipedia has steadily gained acceptance by their teachers.
51. Justin Timberlake has always been a solo act.
52. S. professional baseball teams have always played in Cuba.
53. Barbie and American Girl have always been sisters at Mattel.
54. Family Guy is the successor to the Father Knows Best they never knew.
55. Motorola and Nokia have always been incredibly shrinking giants.
56. Melissa has always been too nice a name to be attached to a computer macro virus.
57. The Mars Polar Lander has always been lost.
58. Women have always scaled both sides of Everest and rowed across the Atlantic.
59. Bill Clinton has always been Hillary Clinton’s aging husband.
60. Paleontologists have always imagined dinosaurs with colorful plumage.

You may find information about our much-praised guide to Millennial education here. Also check out our Speakers’ Program–-we offer custom-made public addresses from coast to coast at a reasonable cost.

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

Copyright© 2017 Beloit College

Mindset List is a registered trademark

Additional material can be found at www.beloit.edu/mindset and www.themindsetlist.com

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 the number of Xers will exceed the number of still-living Boomers.

 Why has Gen X been overlooked? Simple: Unlike the Boomers, who spearheaded the cultural revolution of the 60s, and the Millennials, who were in the vanguard of the 1990s high tech revolution, Gen Xers have had no revolution to call their own. They have been a “guinea pig” generation, as though Boomers said to them, “Well, OK. We’ve transformed American society’s norms, so now let’s see how you cope with your birthright—let’s discover how you deal with the fallout.”

 The following (I hope) is an informative, lively, and long overdue portrait of what has been called America’s most underrated generation.

 #1. The Pill helped turn them into the Baby Busters, the smallest generation since the Great Depression.

 #2. The higher their parents’ educational level, the more likely they were to come home at 4 to an empty house–except for the microwave and MTV.

 #3. They were the first Pampers generation—hence, the first with genuinely dry bottoms.

 #4. When the first wave of Xers were kids, only 9 states had joint custody–so they got to know one divorced parent much better than the other.

 #5. The year the first X kids were born, Marshall McLuhan announced a “new electronic age” in which “we wear all mankind as our skins.”

 #6. They grew up with the highest divorce rates in American history—the Boomer “cult of the child” having shifted to the Gen X “cult of the adult,” seeking cosmic answers in Esalen and Transcendental Meditation. 

 #7. They have little or no memory of Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X, or Martin Luther King.

 #8. Perhaps as a sign of how little adults paid attention to them, their generation found no widespread name until thirty years after the first Xer was born.

 #9. When the War in Vietnam ended they were between plus 11 and minus 5.

 #10. Their parents grew up during the two decades with the sharpest increase ever in college degrees.

 #11. They are the first cable generation.

 #12. They came into a world where, in the words of Andy Warhol, “just when you’ve become famous, someone comes along and turns you into a warm-up act.”

 #13. They were the first young people in history to learn that sex could kill you.

 #14. As they were growing up, the makers of One-A-Day-Multiple Vitamin Tablets touted their product as “The Other Pill.”

 #15. Attending post-segregated schools, they were the first young people in American history actually to live the civil rights movement.

 #16. For them as kids, advanced technology were color portable TVs that wouldn’t “give you a hernia to lift.”

 #17. Assessments of them have ranged from the view that they are slackers to the current one: that they’re the most entrepreneurial generation in recent American history.

 #18. Many of their mothers listened hard when Betty Friedan said no American girl should be brought up to become a housewife.

 #19. The first Title IX generation, they went to high schools where serious attention had to be paid to the mismatch of funds for boys’ and girls’ basketball.

 #20. One demographer says that “Gen X” was actually born between 1960 and 1966, with the group born after that (1967-1979) the “Bust” generation (with historically low birth rates).

 #21. One of the first popular commercials they are likely to recall was Alka Seltzer’s homage to American excess: “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.”

 #22. After 9/11, when they were hitting their 30s, Gen X marriages began to spike—no more of this “living alone.”

 #23. They grew up with mixed signals: while Gloria Steinem was calling for a feminist revolution, an ad implored men to give their wives a skimpy nightgown—“something sexy for her and for yourself.”

 #24. As the thirteenth generation after the American Revolution, they were briefly called, for lack of anything else, “Gen 13.”

 #25. As they were growing up, so did billions of new dollars for “the singles industry.”

 #26. They tended to be much less self-trumpeting than Baby Boomers were.

 #27. They have grown up in an America where the whole family eats fewer and fewer meals inside the home.

 #28. Older Gen Xers have emerged as “stealth fighter parents,” hands off until something needs an intervention and then getting involved forcefully.

 #29. When the first Gen X kids were starting to school, they didn’t read a Scientific American prediction that the United States would face severe energy shortages by the year 2000.

 #30. Recent surveys have found them happy and fulfilled, with special attention to work/life balance: pretty good for “America’s neglected middle child.”

 #31. Earth Day has always been normal.

 #32. As they grew up, Michael Jackson was their favored entertainment icon; Space Invaders their favorite game; the videocassette their favorite technology.

 #33. They were the last American generation to have had a low-tech childhood.

 #34. Their love of grunge–and Richard Linklater’s Slacker–stamped them as a cynical gang of unfocused youth.

 #35. Now in their 40s and 50s, they wonder if Seinfeld and Kramer would have ever talked to each other if they’d been afflicted with smart phones.

 #36. They grew up with Johnny on NBC after the evening news and have no idea who Jack Paar was.

 #37. Unless one counts the Iranian hostage crisis or attempted murder to Ronald Reagan, they came of age with little national trauma.

 #38. They were the first generation of schoolchildren that, if they had a Tuesday morning exam, could record Monday Night Football somehow.

 #39. As they grew up, the arrest rate for women went up much faster than did the rate for men.

 #40. The average American family size has always been declining and in their lifetimes has never been as high as 4.

 #41. They are the last generation in America to be spanked in school constitutionally.

#42. Films have always been shone on planes.

 #43. They are the first generation to grow up in a world where a plastic card—so that you can buy stuff you can’t afford—has been an essential American possession.

 #44. They grew up with unisex, condemned by Jerry Falwell; their kids are growing up with trans-sexuals, condemned by Jerry Falwell, Jr.

 #45. They have never applied to Harvard when the male-female ratio was anything other than 50-50.

 #46. They were the first kids to have the privilege of reading People while waiting to have their cavities filled.

 #47. For as long as they can remember, jogging has been routine.

 #48. Public acceptance of pre-marital sex in America has always been on the rise.

 #49. As they matured, it must have seemed that the FBI and CIA were always apologizing for something.

 #50. When the first Gen X kid was born, no one thought the 1964 Civil Rights act had anything to do with gender; when the last Gen X kid was born, the Army proclaimed that “some of our best men are women.”

 AND

 As long as Xers have been alive, there have always been Ford Mustangs, Pop Tarts, Lucky Charms, Coffee Mate, Flairs, self-service post offices, zip codes, Diet Pepsi, domed stadia, all-news radio stations, and Moog synthesizers.

Tom McBride is co-author of The Mindset Lists of American History and The Mindset List of the Obscure. He has also written three mystery novels: Godawful Dreams (selected by public radio’s Chapter a Day last summer), Rox & Darlene, and The Homicide at Malahide; and has also written The Great American Lay: An All-Too-Brief History of American Sex. All are available on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. He, Ron Nief, and Charles Westerberg frequently speak around the country on generational, especially Millennial, issues. Email him at mcbridet@beloit.edu