“Whether or not we want to accept or condone it, the majority of Harvard students are performance optimizers,” he said after the meeting.

Administrators also discussed a proposal submitted by the UC that asked for interdisciplinary seminars for seniors.

Citing the slowdown in hiring new faculty members, administrators balked at the request.

In addition, Lewis said he thought the proposal’s goal of catering to students who might otherwise shy away from courses outside their own departments did not “make the audience sound like a very attractive teaching opportunity for the professor.”

But Himel maintained the importance of such a program.

“There is some sort of unwillingness to acknowledge that students aren’t always going to take intellectual risks,” he said. “As a history major, you’re not going to go take a class in astrophysics if you have to take that class with a bunch of other astrophysics [majors], unless there is a system that’s more cushioned.”

—Staff writer Rebecca D. Robbins can be reached at rrobbins@college.harvard.edu.