The chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education, James E. Rogers, was characteristically outspoken in a speech on Friday in which he attacked Gov. James Gibbons’s proposed cuts to higher education. But the governor, with whom Mr. Rogers has been feuding publicly for months, was not the only target of the chancellor’s ire: Nevada citizens got a tongue-lashing, too.

“Your only relationship with the education system is to ship your unprepared kids to school, not with the expectation of success, but with the demand that an education system — inadequately funded — develop and/or repair children that you as a parent did not prepare,” Mr. Rogers said, according to the Associated Press. “It is the public — that means you — that has created this disaster of a public-education system.”

Mr. Rogers said the governor’s proposal to cut 36 percent out of the state’s higher-education budget would force some Nevada campuses to close. Governor Gibbons, a Republican, plans to raise taxes on hotel rooms but has said he will consider no other tax increases.

Was Mr. Rogers’s diatribe a public-relations flub, or might it inspire voters to demand that the governor reconsider? —Jennifer Ruark