Twice a year, UW Provost and Executive Vice President Phyllis Wise holds a town-hall meeting to address pertinent issues concerning the university community.

While yesterday’s town-hall meeting was routine, it drew in substantially more student participation than the provost’s previous biannual town halls.

“There’s always some student participation,” said Tricia Thompson, associate vice president of marketing for the UW, who organizes the meetings. “But it seemed it was the majority of the audience today.”

The current economic challenges and long-term budgetary planning for the university were the topics of focus at this meeting.

With an audience of more than 100 people, Thompson said it was good to see more students approaching the microphone and sharing their thoughts about the budget with Wise.

“There’s always a mix of students, but there was an awful lot of folks up there at the microphone asking questions today, and it was neat to see that,” Thompson said. “It’s an opportunity for [students] to ask [Wise] questions directly.”

One of the prominent issues that drew student concern was the fact that the UW is now receiving more money from private sources than from the state Legislature for the first time in the school’s history.

“I’m curious about how the public has supported us less and less,” one student asked. “I’m wondering how much Olympia might be reflecting that.”

Wise said the student’s question was “probably the wisest question anyone has asked” and discussed the UW’s plan for future funding, addressing the fact that the state Legislature has been providing proportionally less funding to higher education each year — an “ongoing trend.”

“It doesn’t mean we should roll over and lie dead,” Wise said. “We will continue to go to the state Legislature [and tell them] that higher education is critical to the quality of life and to the whole state, but we must also make long-term plans.”

The long-term plan, discussed under Wise’s “Lessons learned from this year” presentation slide, included finding other sources of revenue instead of depending solely on state funding. This drew concern from some students who saw it as privatizing the university and turning it into a business rather than an academic institution.

“We are the University of Washington rather than Boeing,” Wise said. “I think we want to use the business principles but we want to never lose sight that we are not a business … we want to use business principles efficiently [and] use money well, but [we] want to do it for students who are very different.”

Freshman Isaiah Billingsley, who sits on the Faculty Senate Planning & Budgeting Committee — one of the two committees that set the UW’s budget — said the university isn’t privatizing as much as it’s preparing for the future.

“In a sense, what the university is trying to do is be self-sustaining and not try to look for support from the state as much as they did before,” he said. “They’re trying to see how the university can become better prepared for future cuts.”

Reach reporter Eric Staples at news@dailyuw.com.