Beloit's New Mindset List

This year’s Mindset List from Beloit College is wistful for me, because I realized as I read it that the people they are describing were born the same year that I graduated from high school. It doesn’t make me feel old exactly, but it does highlight some of the disconnects that can happen when doing communication at a college.

For instance, today I heard a professor make a pretty funny comparison using the “Landshark” skit on Saturday Night Live as an example. This class didn’t even remember Wayne’s World, let alone the early zany years of Akroyd and others.
It is easy for time to pass and to realize that those things that we thought were cultural touchstones have changed. Sure, within my group of friends nobody lets a good “Caddy Shack” reference go by, but when I’m with students most of them just think I’m weird.

Relevance. It is a key challenge for the communicator, and it may be the key challenge of the University in coming years as pressure continues to mount and we face a generation that has always had online classrooms, went to college with laptops, and did as much research from Starbucks as they did in the library.