Femmeren: a Friday bar without a home

After a single night of partying, Femmeren, the Friday Bar belonging to Media, Cognition and Communication, has found itself banned from its premises, as administrators took offense to an insufficiently clean hallway. A “protest bar” is scheduled at Studenterhuset, in reaction to the decision.

After the move to KUA2, for the first time, all five lines of study in the institute found themselves bundled into a single bar. The ban threatens this cross-disciplinary social profile, and might undo months of work, dating back to November 2012.

“The ban was carried out this Tuesday, three days before the next bar was scheduled. The working volunteers had set off their Friday night to make a great second party, but we were shut down; we hadn’t obeyed the rules and had failed to clean 10 m2 of hallway properly. It was our understanding that a cleaning crew would take care of the floors if we made sure that the cleaning of them was possible”, says Mads Færch, a 5th semester Rhetoric student and Head of Femmeren.

Youth in revolt

The institute administration’s decision has stricken a shaky, newly formed establishment, and volunteers are already planning the bar’s comeback. The students running the bar rapidly made a deal with the student bar, Studenterhuset, to have the aptly named Protest Bar be held there instead. The event will take place tonight, Friday 27, from 5pm till 1am.

On October 11th, Femmeren will return to KUA2, but another dirty floor will result in a one-year ban from the premises.

“We might contact different media, plead our case at a higher faculty level or maybe even arrange protests. All is undecided, but we won’t stop fighting for Femmeren’s survival because of 10m2 of dirty floors. The student environment is worth much more than that”, Mads says.

An administration blind to social needs

With a Friday bar that closes around 12 o’clock and is administered by students with vast experience in student bar initiatives, it is unclear what went wrong, or how it’s possible that students made enough of a mess for the administration to threaten a year-long ban.

“This Tuesday we received a mail with the cleaning pictures and a letter saying that we were banned from throwing parties for a month. No discussion, no communication, no bargaining. Everything was already decided”, he says.

The fresh batch of students attending the five courses has had sparse chances of cross-course fraternization. While moving the bar might very well send some sort of signal to the institute’s administration, the fate of a healthy and social student environment lies solely in the hands of the people cleaning the floors in October.

University Post could not reach representatives responsible for the ban prior to publication.

universitypost@adm.ku.dk

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