Opinion

As California cuts college admissions and introduces the prospect of tuition hikes to help rescue the state from its self-inflicted billion-dollar financial mess, higher education gets pushed even further out of reach. It's a cold dose of reality for an 18-year-old just getting started.

According to estimates provided by the Harvard News Office in February of 2008, in the United States alone there are 73,000 individuals who are on the waiting list to receive kidneys. Worldwide there are over a million people with end-stage renal disease, which results in death without a kidney transplant. Poverty levels are as high as ever and unfortunately the economic crisis in the U.S. goes beyond its borders. People need organs, while others need money. Therefore, the question must be posed: Should the poor be allowed to sell their organs?

In "Rejecting AIDS Denialism" in the Nov. 10 issue of the New University, Mengfei Chen wrote a powerful article about the importance of South Africa facing the reality of HIV if they are to limit its spread and, eventually, if we, as a world people, are to master the disease. I would like to add, however, a very important point. In the United States, we also live in the midst of "denialism."

In "Natural Theology," Reverend William Paley put forth the most appealing and untrue argument for creationism: All living things, Paley said, are too intricately designed to have come about by blind chance.

Decency could return to politics once again. No, I don't mean decency in the sense of honesty or fewer bribes from slick lobbyists. Nor do I mean less party jockeying and sober apologies with the wife on one side and the mistress on the other. I mean decency in just one matter of the political process: finance.

Education is a right, not a privilege. Herein lies one of the major flaws of the American system and one of the reasons there is such a wide gap between the rich and the poor. Essentially, if all people were given the same opportunities to receive an education, everyone would have an equal chance of succeeding. Equality of opportunity—it is the principle that America was built on, and the principle that can make the American dream possible.

As I entered the Los Angeles Area on the drive down from my hometown of Berkeley, the first thing I noticed was a curious shade of gray spanning a foot above the horizon. I turned to the friend I was traveling with, who happened to be from Los Angeles, and pointed. "What is that?" I asked, having never been to Los Angeles or to Orange County. "Oh, what? Uh, yeah, that's the smog," she replied nonchalantly. "It's whatever."

If there is one beneficial outcome to illegal immigration, it's the creation of more jobs for the Border Patrol. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, with a renewed interest in border protection, is creating a multibillion-dollar web of border security jobs. The jobs are aimed at individuals with a strong interest in working to catch terrorists, illegal immigrants and smugglers along the U.S.-Mexico border. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBPA) primarily handle the jobs, which are based on the borders of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas.

The 2008 election may have been one of the most historic elections in America. Racial boundaries were torn down on both a national and local level when President-elect Barack Obama became the first black president and Irvine elected its first Asian-American mayor, Sukhee Kang.

So you're walking down Ring Mall from your Humanities class, animatedly chatting with your friends, when all of a sudden, as you turn to face forward, you get a mouthful of good ol' carbon monoxide mixed with benzene, arsenic, formaldehyde and about 3,996 other slightly calamitous chemicals from the silver-haired Spanish professor strolling along in front of you, twiddling his Cuban between his thumb and forefinger. How do you react?

Chancellor Charles B. Reed of the California State University system announced, among other revisions, plans to raise academic standards for entering freshmen for all state universities on Nov. 17. This came just days after reports presented to the University of California Regents on Nov. 12 showed that the system's endowment has lost $1 billion in recent months, standing at an estimated $5.7 billion on Sept. 30, down from $6.7 billion as of Dec. 31, 2007.

When you think about what it means to study aboard, what comes to mind? Is it the historical sites? Is it the foreign people and their customs? Or is it something else entirely?