With the possibility of drawing on resources from the Rady School of Management to assist the ailing Grove Caffe, the A.S. Council and Grove managers have a brief respite during which they can develop a new plan for the eatery. Key to this process should be a reexamination of the A.S. Enterprise Operations’ goals – modifying them if necessary – and the same hard line for student authority toward which the council has been edging.

Cooperating with the Rady School should help keep the cafe in the black, while at the same time giving undergraduates a practical business education from experienced managers. However, the council’s decision-makers must ensure that students are actively involved in the management and planning of enterprises, and not simply providing the day-to-day workforce.

After all, making money is not an explicit goal of the enterprise. (If it were, even government bonds would be more reliably profitable than any existing A.S. enterprise.) The primary purpose of A.S. Enterprise Operations, as outlined in its charter, is to encourage entrepreneurship and develop student services – even to the point of running a continual deficit, if the service is valuable enough.

Allowing the Grove to continue as it has is clearly untenable: Student entrepreneurship should not be encouraged up an alley with train tracks on the far end. But codifying a system that puts operational authority in the hands of anyone other than a student – no matter how gifted their business talents, and no matter how much money they may generate for Associated Students – would undermine the venture’s entire premise.