Universities face a number of challenges which threaten to make them less attractive and more expensive. Indeed, some seem already to consider universities increasingly irrelevant. Yet at their best they are – or should be – the stewards of a long tradition of scholarship, of the rigour, honesty and free discourse that alone can lead to truth, and the custodians of wisdom. Hemisphere theory may offer a lens through which to understand how we come to be in this predicament and how we can begin to extricate ourselves from it.
IAIN MCGILCHRIST is a literary scholar, consultant psychiatrist, and the noted author of the neuroscientific work, The Master and His Emissary (2009), and the epistemological and metaphysical, The Matter With Things (2021).
