Beloit’s Mindset List has become somewhat famous but if two anonymous professors have anything to with it, the Mindset List will be no more.

Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed reports.

Whose Mindset?

Beloit College’s “Mindset List” has become a rite of fall. Each list (such as the one being released today) offers examples of things that an 18-year-old arriving on campus would and would not have experienced. Names of some people who were significant to their parents’ generation (this year Dean Martin and Jerry Garcia, among others) have “always been dead.” In theory, professors and administrators get a reminder not to assume that the new students on campus share their cultural and historic signposts.

For Beloit, the list has been public relations gold, resulting in countless articles (including on this website every year), a book, even, and imitators as far away as Australia. There have also been grumbles from academics who have tired of the format (or PR people who admit to being jealous that Beloit thought of this idea first).

Some bloggers have challenged the list. An Inside Higher Ed blogger, Kenneth C. Green, wondered in 2010 whether the list contributes to the sense of many faculty members that today’s students somehow know less than did previous generations, a common — if not necessarily verified — lament whose reinforcement may not be a good thing for anyone.

This year two anonymous professors — one from a large public university and the other from a community college — have declared their intent to destroy the list, which has been going strong since 1998. They are unveiling a site — Beloit Mindlessness — that is “dedicated to the mockery and eventual destruction of the Beloit mindset list.”

Via e-mail, they said that they have no connection to Beloit or anyone associated with the list. They write as “Disgruntled Prof” and “John Q. Angry.”