A late-summer dispatch from a campus where even the downhill picks up speed
It’s mid-August at MIT, and nothing is flat — not the skyline, not the sidewalks, not even the downhill. Everything tilts into motion. The air already carries that faint trace of Back-to-School™, not yet the haunted kind — more like a stray bottle rocket on July 3rd: a reminder that the real noise will soon crescendo.
This year’s twist: we have a new provost. An engineer. Again. MIT hiring engineers into leadership is like Dunkin’ selling coffee — no one is surprised. MIT runs on engineers. And yet, engineers (and I’m one) tend to make headlines more when something is on fire. I wish our new provost well. Truly. I also give it until mid-September before the first alarm bell rings. (The first Institute Faculty Meeting — announced by our new faculty officer team with tea before and booze after — is September 17.)
Inbox as Barometer
The first signs of seasonal change aren’t in the trees or the weather — they’re in my inbox.
June emails: Have a great summer! Rest! Recharge!
Mid-August emails: Advising schedules are posted. Faculty retreat is coming. Get ready.
My replies? Around 1 p.m. the next day — if I remember to flag them. Sometimes I pretend the reminder was the original. Outside, the crickets (Orthoptera, for those keeping score) chirp in sync with the departmental pings. Both grow louder until the season tips over.
Two Time Scales
Inbox pings are one thing. Sirens are another.
Since January, we’ve watched an administration strike early at academia where it hurts most: the grants, the funding. Then they came for the students exercising their First Amendment rights — Mahmoud Khalil, arrested in New York; Rümeysa Öztürk, abducted in Somerville; Mohsen Mahdawi, detained in Vermont — a string of ICE actions that sent a wave of panic through MIT, the same panic that rippled through Boston’s immigrant neighborhoods, from Somerville to Chelsea, from East Boston to Malden. Our students. Our neighbors.
Universities adapt — it’s what they do — but adaptation here moves at the pace of academia, measured in years or decades. This administration operates an order of magnitude faster. Two speeds, as engineers might put it, separated morally by light years. But morals don’t protect you, not even on the streets of Somerville.
How to Make a President Fly
It’s been a year or two of academic superhero films that end badly. Remember when Harvard’s president stood up this spring to the political bullies? For one bright, cape-flapping moment, we thought: invincible. Then — skyscraper → pavement.
I know too much about free fall not to recognize one, whether from gravity or under duress. The first is physical, the second moral — and as we keep learning, morals don’t provide food.
The list became a tragic trilogy in 2024: UPenn first, Harvard second, Columbia third. All women. One of them Black. Adaptation now — in 2025 it sounds more like survival mode — requires a parachute stitched from equal parts legalese and plausible deniability. Bless Sally Kornbluth, who somehow threaded that needle without tearing the fabric.
The New Boyle’s Law
When Columbia signed its first agreement with the Trump administration in late July, Harvard was bound to follow — as if Boyle’s law, pressure inversely proportional to volume, had been rewritten as: political pressure inversely proportional to institutional backbone.
This year’s shift is more than turbulence — it is austerity. Hiring frozen. Budgets cut five, sometimes ten percent. Graduate enrollment down eighteen. By my rough calculation, that’s 250 fewer gowns crossing the stage at Commencement. Don’t trust the math — trust the trend. The years of plenty are over; the years of famine have begun.
(Admissions supplied their own corollary: Black representation down from 13–15% to 5%, Hispanic from 15–16% to 11%. We are anxiously waiting for the Class of 2029 numbers.)
As if someone had been running an exercise in hypothesis testing, the Institute closed its DEI office and eliminated the VP for Equity and Inclusion post. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion have been left orphaned in the hallways, like boxes no one claims to own. The humanities, too, are being tested: support persists through selective programs and collaborations, but the mood is quieter, more defensive — part of the same holding pattern gripping the entire campus as it reorganizes, subdued around scarcity.
Scarcity scales faster than innovation — and with far less trial and error.
Scarcity may be measurable, but August makes it personal.
Summer Blues
It is tempting, in August, to dress all this up in laws of nature: Boyle last year, Newton’s Third perhaps this year, or even something quantum, indeterminate, beyond comprehension. But none of that explains the mood.
Late summer always feels thinner, lonelier. The inbox grows louder, the campus stays quiet, and you begin to fear you won’t finish what you set out to do. The nods of community are fewer, the casual conversations that remind you you’re not alone.
And what lies ahead — already appearing in August — are the harder encounters: the colleague reeling from a grant cancellation, the quiet mention of budget cuts, the graduate student who fears being refused re-entry at Logan, or the advisee you are guiding through a disciplinary process that found no summer rest.
Successes and struggles alike remind us that we live this experiment together — a community that persists, even when August makes it feel otherwise.
Hope is not a law of nature. Hope is a choice — one we make together. I have two weeks left to practice it, to pretend nothing has happened. At MIT, we call that strategic adaptation. And in August, it sounds almost like hope — which, if not a law of nature, may yet be a force of nature.
