So, the Board of Regents.

If you skipped the front page, take a detour and get the facts on the Regents’ meeting, Wednesday. We’ll recount several of them here, but only in summary.

But either in passing the front page or from conversation with friends, classmates or professors, you’ve probably heard that the Regents have been forced to cut $60 million from their fiscal year 2010 budget.

You’ve probably also heard that the budget reduction amounts to a $24.5 million cut for Iowa State.

Other neat facts:

– State appropriations have been cut by 22 percent since Fiscal Year 2009.

– State appropriations haven’t been this low since 1998 or since before 1990, if you take inflation into account.

In Board of Regents President David Miles’ words, “we face very real challenges” in the days ahead.

In their meeting Wednesday, Miles made seven recommendations to the institution heads, as means for making their new, lower budgets:

– Consider temporary salary reductions

– Consider temporary layoffs

– Consider benefit revisions, temporary and/or permanent

– Consider postponing repairs to facilities

– Consider eliminating programs

– Consider permanent layoffs and last, but not least,

– Consider a tuition surcharge for the spring semester

Yeah, we saved the best for last.

And here’s why:

It’s natural, what you’re feeling right now — that knee-jerk reaction that you can only describe as outrage over the idea of paying an extra fee next semester, essentially, in order to help the university make its budget.

We know. We’ve felt it too.

So take a minute, and feel it; then take a minute to reconsider.

The state of Iowa isn’t going to generate as much money as they were expecting.

The Board of Regents, consequentially, has to bear a chunk of the blow.

We say you should consider that it may fall to us to bear a bit of the blow as well, because, if we don’t, the university will be forced to find the funds somewhere else, in the form of any of the other options listed above.

And none of them make Iowa State a higher quality or more affordable university — the Board of Regents’ two chief goals for its public institutions.

Arguments abound — and they should — about how Gov. Culver handled the situation, whether a special session should have been called, and about how the university should implement the cuts. If you have strong feelings, or maybe an idea you think should be considered, talk to any one of the representatives on the University Budget Advisory Committee — they will advise Provost Elizabeth Hoffman on how the university should handle the cuts, and she, in turn, will advise President Geoffroy. John Turk, president of the Government of the Student Body, and Aaron Gross, president of the Graduate and Professional Student Senate, represent students, specifically.

Miles, in an attempt to put things plainly, said we’d have to raise tuition by more than 8 percent if it were the only place the Regents institutions were going to look for budget relief.

It won’t be, and, for that, we can all breathe a sigh of relief.

President Geoffroy is about to make difficult decisions in an effort to reduce the university’s budget by more than $24 million.

We don’t feel qualified to tell him how to do it, and it seems short-sighted or selfish to presume that we shouldn’t be a part of the solution.

But a conversation is well underway to find cuts, and we hope you’ll be a part of it.