What do first year's really think? THE US's Beloit College's annual "Mindset List" has become an annual rite. Each list 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, a book, even, and imitators. But the list has attracted detractors. This year two anonymous professors 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." Their website takes issue with the idea of reading too much into freshmen by focusing on events that happened about 18 years ago to divide generations into those who did and did not experience certain things -- without any possibility that students might actually have read books or might not see the year of their birth as a great divide. The fake introduction said: "This year's entering college class ... may have had PlayStations in their cribs and their first solid food may have been stuffed crust pizza." The two professors specifically focus on the issue of relating everything to events that took place 18 years ago. Each year's list is constructed ... by a couple guys going to a library and looking at microfiche of things that happened 18 years earlier," Beloitmindlessness says. Clearly this makes absolutely no sense. A person's 'mindset' -- their understanding of how the world works, their values and interests, and so on - tends to be shaped by things that happened to them once they developed an understanding of their social environment more sophisticated than a newborn's. Things that happened ten or five or even one year earlier are going to be far more important to an 18-year-old than things than happened 18 years ago. Asked why he would spend so much time on a site to take down the Mindset List, Disgruntled Professor said via e-mail: "It portrays professors as out-of-touch coots who use their class time to prattle on about who shot J.R., Madonna, the colour of M&Ms and other trivia. It makes academic researchers look stupid because it is one of the most widely covered 'reports' on academic life - and it is of abysmal quality. The two co-authors of the Beloit list are Ron Nief, emeritus director of public affairs, and Tom McBride, Keefer Professor of the Humanities. Via e-mail, McBride said "the authors of the 'mindless' list are misreading the Mindset List. The point is not to portray today's college students as lazy and solipsistic. On the contrary, we began our list 18 years ago because we were tired of other lists that did just that. He added that the goals of the list include "to provide a concise overview of what has happened in the short lifetimes of entering college students -- and to detail what has, in effect, always been 'normal' for them. It is not about their ignorance or navel-gazing or anything at all like that. Further, McBride said he and Nief hoped "to spark intergenerational conversations within homes and classrooms" and "to remind teachers that some of their allusions and references are going to need a bit of explanation." Here are selections from this year's list. For this year's new students, born in 1995: Dean Martin, Mickey Mantle and Jerry Garcia have always been dead. Eminem and LL Cool J could show up at parents" weekend. They are the sharing generation, having shown tendencies to share everything, including possessions, no matter how personal. Having a chat has seldom involved talking. Gaga has never been baby talk. They could always get rid of their outdated toys on eBay. They have known only two presidents. Their TV screens keep getting smaller as their parents" screens grow ever larger. PayPal has replaced a pen pal as a best friend online. Rites of passage have more to do with having their own cell phone and Skype accounts than with getting a driver's license and car. A tablet is no longer something you take in the morning. Plasma has never been just a bodily fluid. With GPS, they have never needed directions to get someplace, just an address. Java has never been just a cup of coffee. Americans and Russians have always cooperated better in orbit than on earth.