NAT will make future sales of IPv4 blocks easier? As you say, MIT doesn't need all those 8 million IP addresses, and eventually will adopt IPv6 anyway. Might as well sell surplus v4 space while it's still valuable.
Also MIT hasn't even rolled out IPv6 yet...
Source: https://gist.github.com/simonster/e22e50cd52b7dffcf5a4db2b8e...