Understanding your new colleagues

It’s that time of year again, when all across the campus you begin to encounter the fresh, eager faces of our new arrivals. They come brimming with energy and enthusiasm and they look to you for guidance and friendship. You want to connect with them, but they seem to be from a different world. How can you hope to appreciate the perspective of that cherubic new colleague who has moved into the office next to yours? As a service to all the senior faculty members out there, we at Creative Destruction offer this Class of 2006 Mindset List – Junior Faculty Edition (with apologies to Beloit College).

Your new colleague is probably about 30 years old, meaning he or she was born in 1976. This means that, from his or her perspective,

1. Computers have always been used at school and in the workplace.
2. There has always been a space shuttle.
3. It has never been legal for an eighteen year old to drink.
4. The great Milli Vanilli lip-synch scandal was a formative experience in their lives.
5. Disco has always been played only on oldies stations.
6. Jimmy Carter is that old guy with Habitat for Humanity.
7. They’ve never had sex without worrying about AIDS.
8. They missed America’s bicentennial.
9. They cast their first vote in a presidential election for either Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, or Ross Perot.
10. Jean-Luc Picard was the original commander of the USS-Enterprise.
11. The Sandinistas, Iran-Contra, the October Surprise, and Salvadoran death squads were items stuck in in the last chapter of their high school history book.
12. Bart Simpson is just their age.
13. The first album they ever bought was Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl. Oh, and it was a CD.
14. Mom and Dad were at Woodstock.
15. We’ve always been at war with drugs.
16. The Soviet Union collapsed right around the time they got their first zit.
17. There’s always been MTV.
18. As children, they idolized Magic Johnson, Joe Montana, and Jose Canseco.
19. They weren’t old enough to see Fast Times at Ridgemont High when it first came out. But Mom and Dad took them to Ghostbusters.
20. They loved Michael Jackson before it was not o.k. for kids to love Michael Jackson.