Beloit College recently released its widely circulated “Mindset List” which aims to help faculty understand how the world looks from the perspective of entering college freshmen, many of whom this year were born in 1986.

As always, the Mindset List for the Class of 2008 includes a range of interesting and funny observations. It has a few notable oversights (e.g., the internet? The Challenger accident?) and a few mistakes (Mike Tyson, contender? And The Shining predates Johnny Carson’s retirement by 12 years …). But what is most interesting to me about the Mindset List is it overwhelming reliance on allusions relevant exclusively to the Baby Boom generation — e.g., Desi Arnaz, Orson Welles, Roy Orbison? What about John Belushi, Kurt Cobain, Princess Diana?.

In the future, the folks at Beloit might want to factor in some input from Generation Xers, who are now coming to occupy more and more faculty positions as the oldest of Boomer’s approach and enter their retirement years. This leads me to think that perhaps we are in need of a separate Mindset List to highlight the different perspectives of senior faculty who can remember where they were when Kennedy was shot and junior faculty who too young or weren’t yet born in 1963, but sure know where they were when the heard that the Space Shuttle had exploded in 1986 (e.g., compare this thesis (in PDF)).