Federation Hall was created in 1984 to meet the need of having a night club on campus, and it apparently used to be popular.
Over the last couple months, Fed Hall has been a trendy topic once again amongst UW students, but for another set of reasons.
Fed Hall is currently a space that is managed and overseen by FedS and has been since the Hall’s inception. Since then, FedS has used the hall to host events for the students, such as during Frosh Week, and rented out the hall to various other groups.
This past April the university, which owns Fed Hall and every other building on campus, decided that they wanted to oversee the operations of the hall themselves.
To some, this has been seen as a move not dissimilar to that of an evil corporate takeover, one that will ruin the essence and history of the hall as a space for students, where the university will place a huge metaphorical velvet rope around the building forcing us, the students, to watch from the outside while university big wigs take our space and use it for, I don’t know, administrating stuff.
Right. It’s just going to be all doom and gloom.
The change in overseeing of the Fed Hall has been received with a harsh backlash from the students over the perceived notion that a change in management, from FedS to the university, will automatically mean that UW students will no longer be available for use by the students.
But this isn’t the case.
The University has stated that they will maintain all student events that are going on in the hall and that it will be run by Food Services.
There have been many points raised that Fed Hall was paid for by students, and should therefore be run by students for the students, and that keeping it so will ensure that the hall is used primarily for students.
But again, under FedS, this was not the case.
Between September 2009 to August 2010, there were a total of 125 events that took place at Fed Hall. Of the 125, less than half of these events were actually used by UW students groups. The rest of these events were made up by private weddings, corporate events such as those held by RIM, and big, monumentally life-altering festivities that actually aren’t, like high school prom.
It seems like Feds had been doing a splendid job of making sure that the Hall was used primarily by university students. The changing of management will do nothing to what is already a place geared toward off-campus groups.
Beside the fact that it has been shown statistically that the hall is not really being utilized by students anymore, losing Fed Hall could now be used as leverage for the students to put more money toward a new student services building, which will actually be used not as a wedding reception hall and high school prom destination, but by university students.
And finally, while the changing of guard from FedS to the university can be be seen as a slap in the face to the previous generations of students who supported and paid for the hall, is its current usage and situation any better? Is having the hall rented out to corporate suits and private events really what the previous students envisioned their nightclub to be?
Furthermore, through my eyes and experience, Fed Hall has become nothing but a vacant building used only for a couple events during Frosh Week. It could well be that since I’m not currently involved with every student group on campus, I never step foot inside the building. But over the course of my undergrad career, Fed Hall has, and will most likely always will be, the building I went to for that magic show on a Thursday during my own orientation week. And after talking around, it seems that this perception isn’t specific to me.
So however it is that the university will utilize the hall, maybe it is time for new management. Because as it stands now and for the past couple of years, Fed Hall has been as as much a student space as the CnD has been an upscale and swank place to buy some fine Columbian coffee.
Leave a Reply