Justifiably Paranoid

  In the not-too-distant past, there was a common perception of a young person’s transition from high school graduation to higher education. The newly liberated ex-high-schooler was believed to leave 12th grade with an excessively limbic, subcortical operating system dominated by raging hormones and rebellious mindsets. Then, learned implacably rational professors performed pedagogical brain interventions that stimulated the prefrontal cortex such that it eventually surged into prominence, resulting in higher education graduates who could and did employ independent rationality to reach critical life decisions.  Given the current 21 st  century state of higher education, however, I have transformed my higher education neurology-brain metaphor to an gastrological-alimentary one.  Contemporary higher education students are not stimulated to frontal lobe engagement by their universities.  Rather, the hapless victims are consumed by universities that extract student ...