The recent announcement of the end of the 55% tuition support for research assistants has prompted many conversations across the Institute. I would like to contribute one from a narrow – and admittedly biased – engineering – perspective.

At first glance, the decision is easy to understand. We are told (and have no reason to doubt) that it is driven by financial realities: a difficult budget environment, the endowment tax, rising costs, and the general principle that, in the end, one cannot spend more than what comes in. Fiscal responsibility is not optional. From this perspective, the decision resembles a mass balance in dollars: inflows, outflows, conservation enforced.

As an engineer, I find that logic entirely coherent. As an academic, I find it incomplete.

Knowledge production – our stated mission – has surprisingly little to do with mass balance. It has much more in common with thermodynamics.

Consider the second law. When work is performed on a system, only part of that work can be stored as recoverable energy. The rest dissipates as heat. In the process, the system’s internal entropy increases. Entropy, in this sense, is not disorder for its own sake; it is a measure of accessible states, of possible change. High-entropy systems are those in which new configurations – new outcomes – are more likely to occur.

This maps uncomfortably well onto how research actually works.

The work we put into the system includes proposal writing, mentoring, supervision, failed experiments, revisions, conversations in hallways, and the many activities that never appear on a CV. Much of this work is carried out jointly with our graduate students. The recoverable energy – the part we can neatly account for – takes the form of papers, books, performances, patents, and other tangible outputs.

If the work rate were perfectly matched to recoverable output, with no dissipation, the process would be reversible. Nothing would be lost. Nothing would linger. Knowledge production would leave no trace beyond the immediate system. In thermodynamic terms, it would be perfectly efficient – and, in academic terms, largely forgettable.

Impact arises precisely from dissipation. The “waste heat” of research – ideas that spill into adjacent fields, students who take unexpected paths, failed projects that inform future ones, informal networks that outlast grants – is where entropy increases. And higher entropy is what makes change possible: entrepreneurial activity, social progress, and, eventually, economic value.

If one accepts this analogy (and engineers are generally inclined to do so), the elimination of tuition support – along with related austerity measures such as library closures and hiring freezes – deserves a second look as a problem of thermodynamics.

Removing tuition support lowers the effective temperature of the system. Fewer students can be supported. Research groups contract. The rate of work decreases. Conservatively, the total work rate is reduced by 25-33% simply because fewer hands and minds are available to do the work.

If input and output scaled linearly, we would expect dissipation – and thus impact – to decline by the same amount. In reality, research systems are rarely linear. Below certain temperatures, processes slow dramatically. Some stop altogether.

None of this negates the importance of fiscal responsibility. Budgets matter. Constraints are real. But a full appreciation of what the Institute can achieve requires recognizing that knowledge production does not obey a single conservation law. It follows many others, individually and collectively.

Decisions based solely on financial mass balance risk optimizing the wrong variable. What matters is how much energy is stored, how much entropy is produced, and whether the system remains warm enough for anything interesting to happen.

By contrast, adding students, faculty, or staff does more than add labor; in an open system each new member imports an entropy flux – a jumble of conversations, mistakes, cross-disciplinary misreadings, and serendipities – that widens the field of possible outcomes and raises the odds of lasting impact. At scale, higher impact can ease fiscal pressure by generating the kinds of returns and opportunities that broaden the Institute’s options (including a reduction of the endowment tax[1]).

The second law cannot tell us what decision to make. It does, however, suggest a useful diagnostic before making one: take the temperature.

[1] Finance, Freedom, and the Faculty Post-Compact: The Case for Independence and Inclusion – MIT Faculty Newsletter

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