RE: University of Maryland's Open Access Deliberations

["Nawin Gupta" <nawin.gupta@comcast.net>]

Wow!  I'll use this next time college tuition comes due.  It has 
been going up around 10% every year.

Nawin Gupta

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of
jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca
Sent: Friday, May 01, 2009 5:46 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: University of Maryland's Open Access Deliberations

It is not because something is not quantifiable that it does not 
exist. Limiting one's vision to the quantifiable must create a 
very restricted, not to say impoverished, vision of human 
activities indeed. There is a famous passage in Saint Exupery's 
Little Prince about this point.

How do you quantify your love for your significant other? By 
calculating the energy for each caress, counting the number of 
caresses and then calculating the amount of oil needed to produce 
this energy at the current price? Good luck in your 
relationship...

To put it yet another way, value for civilization does not limit 
itself to economic value. If kids somewhere are touched because 
they understand a poem better through a piece of literary 
criticism, and if that kid's life is then to be changed in subtle 
and beautiful ways because of that reading, I believe that 
constitutes value for civilization and I believe no price can be 
assigned to it. But if that reading prevents this kid later to 
turn into a suicide bomber, that piece of literary criticism 
could have the value of the Twin Towers.

Number fetishists and market fundamentalists, as we can see all 
around us, are destroying a lot of value all around us. Value 
quantified in the trillions. How inspiring!

jean-claude Guedon