There is a recession on the way, some experts say.

Financial institutions are going under; Washington Mutual was sold off to the highest bidder, the government contemplates bailing out lenders. What to do?

If the government bails out institutions, the everyman foots the bill for salaries for millionaires. If the government doesn’t, than perhaps we spiral into a recession-caused depression rivaled only by the Great one.

And for students, this means being deprived of some of the most necessary aspects of our lives.

Deprived of iPods and laptops, we will have to go back to listening in class for entertainment. Lines for coffee will stretch out like the unemployment lines of yore as the campus’ numerous hot beverage and snack establishments are reduced, by necessity, to just one. Students will be forced to wait as long as 10 minutes for the coffee they so desperately need.

With electricity prices soaring, the coffee itself will be heated by a cheaper energy alternative: wood stoves, which will be powered by sacrificed cherry trees from the Quad.

Although students will have to live with five or six roommates in one-room apartments just to pay the rent, previous practice in overcrowded dorms will serve them well. As the books of Odegaard are burned for warmth in our mild Northwest winter, students shall bunk in their vacant spaces, stacked like the books they replace: to the ceiling.

Students will roam the campus like squirrels, quarreling over scraps of food hoarded from garbage bins. They will store these morsels in their backpacks and satchels and deposit them in desks around campus. Gangs shall form and wars rage between the north campus liberal arts tribe and the south campus sciences covenant.

Students living in this unprecedented state of deprivation will no longer be able to ride the bus from Terry-Lander to the HUB, and will instead, like their grandparents, have to walk uphill both ways.

Forced to drink cheap beer and shower at the IMA, students will no longer be able to afford to tailgate on yachts and speed boats, and will instead be confined to the much less stable, and much more wet, IMA canoe.

Yes, our students will truly be a sad sight in these times.