MERCED - The University of California at Merced, now going up in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley, is a moving example of good people - many of them academic stars - trying to implement what many others think is a lousy idea in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Senate President Pro Tem John Burton called it the "biggest boondoggle ever," a project pushed through a reluctant Legislature by real estate promoters and other regional boosters more interested in development than in higher learning.

But the valley, the poorest and probably the most deprived region of California, needs every beacon of hope it can get. In 2002, only 1,400 of the 41,000 high school graduates from the 11-county region around Merced enrolled at a UC campus. Many who were eligible didn't enroll or even apply. Among most, the pinnacle of aspiration now is a two-year slot at a community college or, at best, a long commute to Fresno State or to what some people still call Turkey Tech in Turlock.

For people such as Chancellor Carol Tomlinson-Keasey who are trying to get Merced ready for its scheduled opening in fall 2005 - assuming the state doesn't delay it again - the place already has had an impact.

Student and parent expectations have been raised, she said. Some 120 community college students are enrolled in a concurrent admission program, many of whom expect to enter the university as sophomores or juniors next year. There's been intense outreach to area students, parents and schools.

Still, Merced officials say they're not sure that enough people understand that Merced will not be just another branch of the California State University - meaning that, as Vice Chancellor David Ashley put it, Merced intends to be "world class ... won't be a regional campus" - and won't train teachers or nurses or serve part-time students.

Although it expects to have a somewhat lower proportion of graduate students than other UC campuses - a few are already working at UCM's temporary headquarters in Atwater a few miles north of the construction site - it will be a full-bore research university.

And it's there that the uncertainties and the problems really begin. UCM was sold by the San Joaquin Valley's promoters as an institution for the region, and it will certainly put some emphasis on valley problems in its research and teaching programs: water resources, public health and environmental science, bioengineering and an undergraduate program, partly funded by the Gallo family, in business management. UCM, said Lindsay Desrochers, its vice president for administration, "will put Merced on the map."

But why, asks Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, locate the place outside a small city in the middle of nowhere? And why another standard-model UC research campus? More opportunities certainly are needed to accommodate undergraduates, but then why not create a quality undergraduate general education campus - a Dartmouth, or maybe several - without the fiscal drain and high costs of a graduate program?

The last time that was tried was in the 1960s, when then-UC President Clark Kerr conceived UC Santa Cruz as a cluster of liberal arts colleges, each roughly on the model of Swarthmore, where Kerr himself went. But UC's institutional pressures eventually turned Santa Cruz into another standard UC campus.

As to location, the theory is that if you build it, they'll come. But even the people in Merced acknowledge that (initially at least) most of its students will come from greater Los Angeles and the Bay Area. As Callan points out, UC Riverside was under-enrolled until the flow of Los Angeles commuters looking for affordable housing began the great influx of people into the Inland Empire.

Because of California's severe fiscal problems, this year's Merced funding already has been cut, and the scheduled opening for the first undergraduate freshmen delayed from this fall to next. And there's the possibility that funding will be further reduced, a prospect that Desrochers said, "I worry about that every day of my life."

Yet given the investment already made and the promises tendered to the affected communities, students and the under-served, heavily Latino population of the region, and given the political clout of the region's boosters and developers, Merced's momentum isn't likely to be stopped.

And for anyone who looks at the poverty statistics in the valley - at the ramshackle housing, the lack of health care, the substandard schools - all the talk about a boondoggle campus in a field in the middle of nowhere has to be placed among the grim reality of the region and the hope that it may bring.

Merced, said Kenji Hakuta, the nationally regarded psycholinguist who came from Stanford to head UCM's new division of social science, humanities and arts, "will serve the survivors of a terrible education system." It may also energize that system.

What's for sure is that the only other thing the region ever got from the state in the last 20 years was prisons.