The University has 30,232 students enrolled this fall. This far exceeds President Witt’s goal, first announced when he arrived in 2003, of enrolling 28,000 students by 2013. At that time, there were fewer than 20,000 students on campus.

The University has just witnessed its fastest period of enrollment growth, and now President Robert Witt plans to announce a new goal to the Board of Trustees in November. That goal should be 30,232 students, forever.

Don’t get me wrong; Alabama has definitely benefited from all the new students. The rise in enrollment has coincided with the establishment of the Honors College, and a lot of the new students are contributing to the academic progress of the University. Just last year, we set a record for having the most students named to the USA Today All-Academic team from one university in one year, ever.

We have returned to national prominence in football and built amazing new facilities.

All of the new students have also undoubtedly benefited from getting an education at the Capstone of the state’s college system.

But we are just that – the Capstone. And we have reached saturation point.

This campus shouldn’t just be a place where students come to get a degree. Alabama should be an experience. That requires having a close-knit community of scholars and leaders actively involved on this campus and in the state.

Such an experience is not possible if we morph into a small metropolis of students being herded through required classes like cows getting milked at a dairy.

We are doing just great with the number of students we have. There are no apparent benefits to adding thousands more.

Even if there was, we do not have the capacity to house them. Witt has asked administrators to review campus infrastructure and determine how many additional students we can handle. They should start by determining what we need to do to handle the students we’ve got.

The Crimson White has been filled with stories and columns this semester about packed parking lots, buses and dining halls. Students are complaining about being forced into the new upper deck for seating on game days, being forced to buy Dining Dollars and a shortage of meal plan options.

Investing energy and resources into solving these issues would benefit the campus much more than striving to meet a new enrollment record every year.

In fact, freezing enrollment at current levels would solve most of the pressing problems facing campus today without negatively impacting students. While some have proposed banning cars for freshmen and moving towards an all-pedestrian campus, those measures would not add to the UA experience. They would make life more difficult for a lot of our students.

There are few opportunities to improve infrastructure to the point it can be expected to easily accommodate a student body that grows any larger. As Chris D’Esposito, assistant director of Transportation Services, told The Crimson White, “There’s only so many places that we can go. You need a considerable funding and considerable land. Right now, from what we have given to us to work with, there’s not too much more we can do.”

Yes, the Board of Trustees has approved a new housing complex behind Riverside, a new recreation center, and the purchase of the Bryce property. Integrating the Bryce property into campus, however, will take years, and fully utilizing it will leave campus so spread out it will be difficult to create any meaningful sense of community.             The new housing complex, for its part, will only replace outdated facilities the University is tearing down. The new rooms won’t even be completed until 2012, anyway.

In the meantime, the University has had to cram students into housing complexes like the Highlands, which were suppose to be torn down over the past summer, and Mallet and Blount, even if they are not a part of those programs.

The first law of holes states that when you’re in one, stop digging. This campus has been stretched to the breaking point. Lets start accommodating our students in a way that lives up to the UA standard, and then lets turn our focus to channeling their collective energy and talent into a campus continuously growing in accomplishment. We’ve got the quantity. Now lets improve the quality.

Tray Smith is the opinions editor of the Crimson White. His column runs on Fridays.