The Cowardly Lion

In the past budget cycle, Nevada's state college and university system accepted $200 million in federal "stimulus" dollars. Administrators used that money to bloat their operating budget, despite the fact they knew full well that was "one-time" money.

So how did higher education Chancellor Dan Klaich respond this week to Gov. Jim Gibbons' request that -- like every other state department -- the college and university system submit a plan to respond to tumbling tax revenues with 10 percent budget cuts?

Cloaked behind the usual rhetoric about how university funding is "an investment in the future of our state," etc., the chancellor is instead asking the Board of Regents to OK a 24.7 percent budget increase, to be funded by Nevada taxpayers right here at ground zero of the Great Recession.

The chancellor admits this is nothing but a negotiating stance. "I don't think this is a time that we can be timid or that we can give up before the fight is engaged," he says.

But -- get this -- the 25 percent hike in state funding would result in a growth of only 3 percent in the university system budget, because they did just what they were warned against: They included the $200 million in one-time "stimulus" funds in their current budget calculations, creating a thoroughly artificial "desperate shortfall" for 2011.

Tough times might be seen by some in academia as an opportunity to prune out dead wood, concentrate on replacement sources of private funding, examine tuition subsides and pare back student bodies by no longer admitting droves of underqualified freshmen.

But Mr. Klaich -- and Regents chairman James Dean Leavitt, who backs his request -- do not seem inclined to make any such lemonade. Instead, they aim to score points in the faculty lounge, posing as Bert Lahr's famous lion: "Put 'em up, put 'em up! Which one of you first? I'll fight you with one paw tied behind my back."

It got a lot of laughs in the movie. If only, as in "The Wizard of Oz," handing someone a sheaf of academic degrees constituted proof they had a brain.