over time—or that entropy will tend to increase over time. Despite some of the notions of negentropy, this law asserts the irreversibility of systems decay over time. The third law asserts that despite entropy, no system will reach absolute zero in terms of energy or temperature. Absolute zero would be complete cessation of all activity—it is the ‘nothingness’ which cannot ever, according to this law, occur completely. The essentials of thermodynamics are, according to Percy Williams Bridgman, 1946 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, completely unsettled and incomplete. He suggested in 1941 that thermodynamics is a field that is both incomplete and under analyzed. Part of what we believe about the field of thermodynamics is that the metaphorical application of these constructs to far-from-equilibrium systems, social systems, human systems, is one of the important contributions that social scientists can have to the further development of the theory. We believe this is an area worthy of much ongoing research. We are focused specifically on the entropic and negentropic forces within universities. The reason 'negentropy' continues to be used is that 'entropy with a negative sign' simply does not capture what is intended by the original term. Schrödinger uses it to identify the remarkable ability of the living system, not only to avoid the effects of entropy production - as dictated by the second law - but to do just the opposite, to increase organization, which intuitively, seems like the converse of entropy. Szent-Györgi, on the other hand, alludes to both the notions of free energy and of organization in his use of the term. Both scientists have the right intuition - energy and organization are inextricably bound up with each other. From Ho 1994: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/negentr.php It is worthy of note that negentropic behaviors can only take root inside an organization that is entropic. By its definition, negentropy is the relief side of entropy. That said, almost all universities are entropic in some ways or other. Finding entropy is relatively easy in today’s universities. Thus, applying negentropy is also relatively easy once we have clarity of understanding and openness to change current behaviors to stave off entropy. The task, then, becomes clarifying the flows of energy and resources within the university itself. Methods: Applying Negentropy The focus of our work has been the general understanding of the application of entropy and negentropy within the university. We have focused on faculty behavior (Author, 2017), though we could as easily examine negentropic leadership, negentropic support work, or negentropic organizational principles. All of these overlap somewhat with our analysis of faculty behavior, but the focus is on faculty behavior as seen through the lens of negentropy. Entropic and negentropic behaviors happen in all sectors of a faculty job description from scholarship to teaching to service. The foundational notions are that negentropic scholarship tends toward social or public intellectual work, teaching goes beyond excellence in the classroom (though it does indeed include that) to engage in enrollment growth, and new curricular offerings, service/outreach goes beyond simply staffing committees that tend to reify existing entropic structures and processes, and tend, instead, to move toward public service and outreach. Why is this? Negentropic faculty behaviors fall into the same essential categories that are required for faculty positions, but they are done in a different, more energyreleasing way, which infuses new ideas, organization, heat, and light, into the system broadly.
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