On Tuesday, the student body – and one Crimson White columnist in particular – was addressed by Dr. Judy Bonner, the Executive Vice President and Provost for the University of Alabama. In her letter, Dr. Bonner attempted to respond to a column written by SoRelle Wyckoff about the ever-increasing population at the University of Alabama and the effects that growth has had on the overall quality of life.

The vast majority of Dr. Bonner’s letter was a jumble of numbers, statistics, acronyms and honor societies – in fact, about 25 percent of the total body was nothing more than an academic résumé for the University. This is fine, except that Ms. Wyckoff at no point attempted to prove anything even closely related to Truman Scholars or National Merit Scholars. In fact, the entire point of the original column was to note the “more personal measures of a university’s population.”

So while Dr. Bonner zeroed her sights on the back of one of the students who helps pay her salary, calling Ms. Wyckoff’s conclusion “erroneous” and taking a quote completely out of context, it was in fact her own piece that completely missed the point.

The quote, “Instead of lowering our standards to raise our numbers, how about we raise our standards and let the numbers fall in line on their own,” seems to be the entire basis for Dr. Bonner taking time out of her day to pen a response to a first-year columnist. But let’s take a look at a few other quotes from Wyckoff’s column.

“Without a doubt, there are definite positives to an increased student population. More students mean more academic talent. The 2011 freshman class, while being the largest, also contains the most National Merit Scholars that UA has seen yet.”

See, Dr. Bonner? She did do some research, after all.

But let’s talk about size; let’s talk about how “standing room only” generally refers to concerts and sporting events, but now equally describes Fresh Food during lunchtime.

Let’s talk about how the resident advisors in Ridgecrest South are outnumbered 50:1.

Let’s talk about how the need for off-campus housing is so great that the only places available are suburb starter-kits like The Woodlands and The Retreat, moving students further away from campus and sapping any charm The Strip and downtown Tuscaloosa may have once had.

Let’s talk about the fact that the University has been consistently tearing down low-cost student housing and replacing it with sorority houses and dorms that cost significantly more money to live in. Let’s talk about how the University is going out of its way to recruit students from affluent areas of the country to fill those higher-cost residence halls.

Sure, those areas might be the places with all those National Merit Scholars, but let’s connect the dots: private schools have consistently higher-performing students, but private schools cost money, so the only people that can afford to attend them (and thus earn a better education) are the people whose parents can afford to send them there. It’s not a coincidence that all those freshmen packing into Ridgecrest South look exactly alike; it’s because they all come from the same white-dominated suburbs where, if kids don’t go to private schools, it’s because they have nicer public schools due to better funding from higher property taxes in their districts.

There’s a reason all the students I meet from Atlanta who are on scholarship are from places like Alpharetta and Marietta and not Stone Mountain or Fayetteville.

Numbers don’t tell the whole story, and often, they can paint a picture that doesn’t exist, but at least I’ll have plenty of time to contemplate them while I wait in a 20-minute line at the Ferguson Center food court.