“There’s no way we’ll be able to look students in the eye and say this will be the same university,” stated Mark Yudof, University of California president, last Friday, systematically becoming my least favorite person.

It’s a bleak time for California; the sunshine and lollipops have long but left us. Where they have gone, however, I am not entirely certain.

The average 18yearold either has not yet developed the capability to understand, or perhaps simply chooses not to understand, what the word “recession” means.

I’ll admit, I wasn’t exactly losing hair over the auto industry losing jobs, nor was I moments away from a heart attack due to Merrill Lynch (whoever that is) receiving $10 billion in bailout money. However, being a college transfer student, suddenly the word “recession” does in fact have meaning.

Performing even the most lackluster Internet search, you will soon discover the University of California system is on the declineWhether it’s the departmenheads at UC San Diego suggesting the closure of lower-tiered UC Riverside and newly established UC Merced, or simply the $813 million that has been cut from the budget, UCs are beginning to worry me.

Call me a pessimist, but I simply cannot help but wonder if the barrage of studying and paper writing I have inundated myself with this past year is truly worth it. Will the lush gardens and state-of-the-art lecture halls of my dream school still remain?

Or will the campus be strewn with dead grass and improvised janitorial closet classrooms by this time next year? Pardon the exaggeration.

I understand the budget needs to be cut, and I am in no way qualified to tell you how we should divert our funds. However, being that we are home to three “Top Five” public universities in the nation, I ask, can we truly afford such drastic cuts in UC funding?

It’s obvious this will cause the prestige and rankings of these some 150-year-old schools to dwindle, perhaps causing students around the country to no longer gasp with envy at the very mention of our state.

Every year the best and brightest in the country move to California to attend UCLA, UC San Diego, and UC Berkeley, and I assure you, if we intend to get out of this with our arms and legs intact, California is going to need all the intelligence it can get. Maclen Stanley Simi Valley