Pennsylvania’s new chancellor of higher education, Frank Brogan, offered no breakthrough directions during his first meeting with the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education’s board of governors.

Brogan, the state’s highest-paid public servant, takes the helm amid what some have called the “financial perfect storm” for Pennsylvania’s public universities; a convergence of declining enrollment, rising costs, cutbacks in state funding and a sluggish economy.

The 14 SSHE affiliates, including Slippery Rock, Clarion, Edinboro, Indiana and California universities in Western Pennsylvania, are doing what they can to weather the storm. There are no easy choices.

Clarion University already has made cuts in staff and services to offset operational costs; Slippery Rock has signaled that similar tough choices must be made there as well.

Brogan and the Board of Governors face even tougher decisions ahead: how to distribute a shrinking stockpile of resources; whether, when and how to recede; how to carry on during a difficult present without permanently harming the system’s future.

Layoffs are an option. So is closing a campus. Such choices are bitter medicine for everyone involved.

Brogan didn’t go that route; instead, he offered some practical strategies, like targeted, specific requests for additional state funding, which would be easier to justify and defend than lump-sum funding requests.

Targeted solicitation is a perceptive idea, used for several years by the United Way and its affiliates. Contributors like to know they are donating to a specific cause or project, not just throwing money at a problem; taxpayers might respond more favorably to similar forms of solicitation from the state system.

Brogan also gave limited support to the idea of adjusting tuition prices by academic major; however, he warned against making blanket adjustments, a move that might have unintended consequences. Instead, he suggested a trial case targeting one academic program.

Brogan says he adheres to a “walk before you run” management style, and his interaction with the Board of Governors bears that out. Brogan needs some time to fully diagnose the “perfect storm” scenario in order to chart the state system’s way out of it.

Even so, time is a limited commodity when the ship is listing in troubled waters. The state system’s difficult times are far from over, and its members are looking to the new skipper for direction on how to respond.