Ryan said that if left to Faculty predictions alone, it is likely that Faculty members would overestimate the number of TFs they will need.

“The concern I have is a budgetary concern. I don’t know how administration will handle [matters if] a slight over projection occurs,” she said. “There will have to be checks and balances between what optimistic professors say and what are probable enrollments.”

Wolcowitz said he recognized Ryan’s concerns as a potential problem and encouraged departments to be “somewhat conservative in the firm commitments they make.”

And despite Ellison’s plea for better treatment of graduate students, Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies Charles S. Maier ’68 said in an interview yesterday that hiring TFs so far in advance seemed unfair to those graduate students who are not ready to commit to teaching a semester in advance.

“[Graduate students] should have some flexibility in the system too,” he said.

But to some undergraduate student leaders who attended the meeting yesterday, the proposal seemed a legitimate idea —one administrators should have considered sooner.

“Forcing the Faculty to plan is a much better idea than preregistration,” said President of the Undergraduate Council Rohit Chopra. “That should have been the first proposal.”

—Staff writer Jessica E. Vascellaro can be reached at vascell@fas.harvard.edu.