The political posturing over our state's finances — what services to cut back, whose jobs to eliminate, now or when someone leaves, and what construction projects to delay or eliminate — has portrayed our governor and many legislators as leaders who'd rather dream on than face reality.

October's week-long special session confirmed their desperation to juggle state and federal funds to get New Mexico through a dozen weeks before the frenetic budget session begins. And during the past few days, Gov. Bill Richardson's response to special-session cost-cutting only accentuates the work ahead of him, our senators and our representatives.

The governor belatedly admitted that it'll take taxes to get us out of a hole that might be a billion dollars deep. There might be some good revenue tidings in the recent jump in oil prices, but chances are that some tax cuts must be repealed — and a few of today's taxes increased.

But cost-cutting, too, is on the table, distasteful as it may be to politicians who love to find jobs for friends and campaign contributors — and difficult as it is for a population woefully short of social services.

Clearly it's time for a combination of creative thinking and tough-mindedness — and nobody has more of that latter quality than Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Like many of our nation's privately endowed colleges, MIT is feeling the squeeze of stock-market setbacks and corporate failures. So, in solid science-and-engineering fashion, school leaders convened an "institute-wide planning task force" to dissect and repair the coming year's budget, and to guide the income-and-outgo policies for years to come.

Early this year, 200 professors, staffers and students began their analytical approach to the near and distant future. On the short term, they were charged with reducing expenses by at least $50 million.

What the institute didn't do was sacrifice its ideals of attracting the nation's best students regardless of need. That's a lot of scholarship money to commit into the future, so not only would there have to be fresh approaches to earning more money, but sacrifices would also have to be made — school by school, department by department.

Key to the process has been willingness of those top-drawer academics to suggest to fellow faculty members where they're misspending money. This is a tactic tried often in corporate and governmental bureaucracies — and can be touchy: Office politics is loaded with notions that I'm doing fine; it's those folks down the hall who are a drag on the operation ...

But the folks at MIT worked collegially and with cool logic, which they applied to their own departments as well as those across the Cambridge campus. In their preliminary report just as the school year was starting, they came up with:

• $11 million in savings through salary shifts;
• $10 million by way of deferred renovations of campus buildings and other infrastructure;
• $5 million by eliminating new initiatives;
• $23 million-plus in administrative and academic spending reductions, and
• $8 million through energy-savings initiatives.

And while they were about it, the task force members looked into ways of promoting the school's historic excellence in teaching and research; it's just the kind of pro-active pursuit MIT needs to overcome today's financial difficulties while setting a positive course for tomorrow.

Could any of the selflessness evident at MIT, especially where it came to senior faculty making money available to lower-compensated professors, be applied to budget-cutting here in New Mexico? Could our higher-paid officials and faculty at our two dozen state colleges take pay cuts for the sake of the junior public servants who'll be counted on today and tomorrow?

Could they come up with cuts in their own operations while suggesting what others could do? They certainly should — and Gov. Richardson should convene a statewide governmental task force as a start.