Have you ever overheard a person delivering a piece of advice so brutal and honest that you’re glad it’s aimed at someone else?

That’s the kind of tough love that was laid on the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education Wednesday afternoon. But for the good of the entire commonwealth, we hope the governor and state legislators were listening and taking notes.

In a series of brutal assessments, the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems said the State System of Higher Education is plagued by a “climate of distrust, non-transparency, confrontation and competition.” The Center went on to say weak leadership at all levels helped exacerbate enrollment and funding problems at most of Pennsylvania’s 14 state-owned universities.

“Governance is not up to the current challenges,” said Dennis Jones, the center’s president emeritus, in a presentation to the system’s board of governors.

It’s a shocking wake-up call for leaders of the state’s beleaguered System of Higher Education. But it could — and should — just as easily be aimed at our elected state officials, who have all failed to exhibit even the faintest shred of leadership for the third budget in a row.

Perhaps, when the center releases its full, written report later this month, it could send out custom copies to the General Assembly and the governor’s mansion, to drive home the point.

There’s plenty of blame to go around: from the legislators who blithely went home without agreeing on how to pay for the budget they approved, to Gov. Tom Wolf who let the spending plan become law without his signature.

Wolf, amid questions about whether his decision is constitutional, said Wednesday that he’s “very comfortable that we’re doing the right thing.”

Well, that makes one person.

House Majority Leader Dave Reed, R-Indiana, in a vigorous display of cognitive dissonance, spent Tuesday simultaneously defending the Republican leadership’s decision to send legislators home without closing the revenue gap and lambasting Wolf for failing to unilaterally balance their budget for them using his line-item veto power.

Reed has apparently never heard the one about the man living in the glass house.

Sarcasm aside, none of this is OK with us — and it shouldn’t be OK with you, either.

This is the third budget cycle in a row in which our elected officials have failed to display anything even approaching leadership or a willingness to compromise on the difficult fiscal issues facing Pennsylvania.

Instead, we’ve been treated — yet again — to politicking, phony fiscal maneuvering, and lazy, ideologically driven stopgap measures that mortgage the state’s future. And we will likely, in the end, receive a lowest-common-denominator budget that does little or nothing to address the state’s problems, while both Republicans and Democrats sit back and sharpen their knives for the 2018 election cycle.

Don’t let them get away with it.