Only After Human Beings Vanish Can the Problem of Consciousness Be Solved Tom McBride 1 Connection If you follow popular science at all, you know that two common themes are when the sun will run out of fuel, and how we can solve the problem of consciousness. The two are rarely if ever connected. It is time that they were.   Scientists know that in a billion years the sun will transition to a red giant and life on earth will be uninhabitable. Multiply a billion times 365 days and watch your calculator explode. You and I have nothing to fret about.   Scientists are much less sure about consciousness. Alfred Russel Wallace, who co-founded the theory of evolution by natural selection with Darwin, once   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, 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