And to me the sort of ‘other’ elephant in the room is the value of Wytham Abbey beyond thinking of it purely as an investment, i.e. in the comment that you link, Owen Cotton-Barratt tried to explain something about his belief in the value of specialist venues that can host conferences, workshops, researcher meetings etc. and that are committed to promoting a certain flavour of “open-ended intellectual exploration”. One can obviously reasonably disagree with him (and admittedly it is very difficult to figure out the monetary value of this stuff), but it probably at least deserves rebutting explicitly?
It would also be helpful to know what their cost-benefit analysis actually consisted of, but I asked that they publish it in response to Owen’s comment and never heard anything.
I think Neel makes a good point.
And to me the sort of ‘other’ elephant in the room is the value of Wytham Abbey beyond thinking of it purely as an investment, i.e. in the comment that you link, Owen Cotton-Barratt tried to explain something about his belief in the value of specialist venues that can host conferences, workshops, researcher meetings etc. and that are committed to promoting a certain flavour of “open-ended intellectual exploration”. One can obviously reasonably disagree with him (and admittedly it is very difficult to figure out the monetary value of this stuff), but it probably at least deserves rebutting explicitly?
It would be helpful to know what events have been hosted there by now.
It would also be helpful to know what their cost-benefit analysis actually consisted of, but I asked that they publish it in response to Owen’s comment and never heard anything.