Tense relations between Nevada’s higher-education chancellor, James E. Rogers, and the state’s Republican governor, James Gibbons, may have reached the breaking point. After the outspoken chancellor sharply criticized Mr. Gibbons in a newspaper commentary published on Sunday, Governor Gibbons announced today that he would no longer deal directly with Mr. Rogers. Instead, he asked the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education to appoint a liaison who could work with his office and the legislature “in a professional and courteous manner.”

Mr. Rogers’s commentary, which appeared on Sunday in the Nevada Appeal, in Carson City, went beyond criticizing the governor’s politics. The chancellor wrote that Mr. Gibbons was “simply a greedy, uninterested, unengaged human being” who was seeking only what he could do “for himself and his greedy friends.”

“The man has absolutely no regard for the welfare of any other human being,” Mr. Rogers wrote.

The governor, in a letter to the Board of Regents today, said he had been “extremely surprised and disappointed” by the commentary and other remarks the chancellor had made in recent days. He accused Mr. Rogers of making “repeated personal attacks” without proposing any productive or realistic solutions and characterized some of the chancellor’s comments as “vile and insulting.”

The governor also released a letter from the board’s chairman and vice chairman, who said they did not endorse Mr. Rogers’s comments and had not seen the commentary before it was published.

The chancellor and the governor have exchanged words over budget and policy decisions many times in the past. In a speech last month, Mr. Rogers lambasted both the governor and the public, saying huge proposed state budget cuts and a lack of parental involvement had wrecked the state’s public education system. —Charles Huckabee