First, they went after Scott Walker (it was pretty lame—he doesn’t have a college degree—but the Washington Post made a big deal of it anyway). Now they are going after Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal because he wants to cut even more from his state university system than Walker plans to. (The actual amount of cuts is mostly rumor, however.)

The Chronicle reports that “Louisiana educators are warning that a nearly $400-million proposed cut will lead to campus closures, widespread faculty layoffs, and larger classes.” And it quotes a lobbyist for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities: “What we are seeing is the attempted dismantling of the public higher-education systems in both Louisiana and Wisconsin as a direct result of the presidential aspirations of those states’ respective governors.”

When Jindal claimed a very slight increase in higher education spending since 2008, the Washington Post’s fact-checker gave him three Pinocchios for stretching the truth. To come to that conclusion, however, fact-checker Michelle Ye Hee Lee had to consider four different ways of measuring the spending (whether you include university hospital expenditures, for example, and the state’s $250 million full-tuition scholarship). She concluded that one of the options would have justified Jindal’s claim, but he deserves the Pinocchios anyway, because he is including student tuition in his figure.

Yet a month earlier, the Chronicle accepted the same figure as Jindal’s in its annual “State Spending on Higher Education” report, based on the generally respected “Grapevine” report of the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University and the Association of State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO).

Interestingly, none of the major stories I saw mentioned the total higher education amount that the supposed $400 million will be cut from. One university sports site (Louisiana Tech), however, did come up with the figure of $1.47 billion—and if that is the case, these will certainly be significant.

Critics attack Jindal for “adamantly” refusing to raise taxes to meet the state budget’s $1.6 billion shortfall (partly brought about by declining oil prices). But they don’t mention the TOPS program (patterned after Georgia’s HOPE scholarships), which gives free tuition to any student who has decent grades and an average (20) ACT score. That $250 million or so is apparently sacrosanct, to both Jindal and the legislature.