After Gov. Pat Quinn called on all members of the University’s Board of Trustees to resign in the wake of the admissions controversy last year, trustees Frances Carroll and James Montgomery held out.

Earlier this month, we asked Quinn if he still believed they should resign, and he was straightforward with us.

“I decided, ‘Well, we’re better off just getting this train moving, instead of litigating,’” he told us. “I thought they should [resign]. I told them that. But they didn’t. We still got the majority of the board (to resign) and the reforms done.”

Was it bad judgment not to force their resignations? Weak leadership? Those points can be argued.

But in a post-Blagojevich, post-admissions scandal world, that kind of candor from a public official should not be overlooked, and it’s one of the reasons we’re endorsing Quinn.

His opponent, Republican State Sen. Bill Brady, did not respond to our requests for an interview, nor did he agree to have a debate on this campus.

But that’s a formality at this point. His plan to “cut a dime of every dollar” in spending and work out the details after the election just isn’t good enough.

The University is owed millions of dollars by the state. The state is billions of dollars in debt.

We don’t think the legislature can agree on enough cuts to fill the gap.

Quinn’s push to generate new revenue for the state via an income tax increase is right, though never the politically prudent thing to do during election season. And we laud him for having the guts to do it.

On ethics, Quinn supports the recall amendment and vetoed bills that would have limited the new Freedom of Information Act and continued legislative tuition waivers.

Socially, he’s a pro-choice governor who wants to pass a civil unions bill before the end of 2010. Now, we have serious reasons to doubt whether that will become a reality soon. But it’s much more likely to happen with Quinn than Brady.

Quinn certainly hasn’t handled things perfectly, and there’s still a lot to fix. But we think he understands government and has character. We think he was put in an implausibly tough situation, but his economics stand a better chance than Brady’s.

He deserves more than half a term to prove it.