Now on its sixth term since its creation in winter term 2014, BarHop continues to offer a social space for students, with free drinks, music and other activities every Thursday at the Hop Garage. After experimenting with hosting the event two nights a week beginning in winter term 2015, BarHop has returned to a once-weekly schedule due to staffing issues, director of student performance programs at the Hopkins Center Joshua Price Kol ’93 said.
The staff currently consists of three to five permanent interns, six to seven bartenders, two to three DJs, four to six ushers, a head usher and a house manager, student programs coordinator at the Hopkins Center Sean Gao ’13 said. He said attendance has increased, with an average over 300 students a night for the first three weeks of the term.
“BarHop requires a lot of student labor, from interns who run it and also plan the events and the programming,” Kol said. “Now that we’ve reverted to one day a week, it seems to be going well. Staffing [BarHop] has not been a problem; attendance has been a good number and people seem to like the programming. And this way, I think we can really focus on interesting programming ideas and different arts-themed activities each week. That’s not to say we won’t throw a Friday night in here or there, re-think it again, but right now, Thursday night feels like the right thing.”
BarHop was initially funded by a donation from an alum who wanted to see a bar on campus. Since then, BarHop has received intermittent donations that keep the program running.
Kol said there was some discussion about seeking College funding earlier in BarHop’s existence, but that BarHop decided against it at the time. This decision could change in the future, he said.
Bartender Reed Sturtevant ’16 said the bartenders cannot buy the best drinks every week and tend to buy instead less of the more expensive “crowd-favorites” such as “Not your Father’s Root Beer” or “Sam Adams Rebel Rouser Double IPA.”
In response to the claim that BarHop’s funds are uncertain, Kol said that funding is a long-term problem that has yet to be tackled, but is not the biggest concern in the short term.
“The funds are definitely not set to run out at the end of spring — we’re not in that position yet,” Kol said. “There’s a lot of alumni interest, so I’m not worried that gifts aren’t going to continue to come in to support BarHop.”
Kol said some of the long-term solutions to funding include more consistent alumni gifts, College subvention or a pay system, although the latter two have not been explored fully.
“We are hoping that the College will step in and [offer funding],” Sturtevant said. “The reason they should do that is BarHop is exactly the kind of alternative social space that the College is trying to promote in the sort of unspoken crusade against the Greek system. BarHop is a really terrific weekly event where undergraduates mingle with graduate students and sometimes even alumni, who can just kind of relax in a partially supervised space and have excellent free drinks and live DJing.”
Gao said that although its intention was to meet a general desire among the student body for a bar-like social environment, BarHop turned out to become an additional or alternative option for a social space aside from Greek life.
“We never really thought about creating an alternative social scene,” Gao said. “We just wanted to create a social scene in general, just involving arts in general. Throughout the year, we’ve embraced the idea that we are, by default, the alternative in the social space arena, but my opinions are just that we should just try to provide the best quality experience to people and that people like it. I don’t care whether it’s alternative or mainstream, just that people like it.”
In terms of programming, Gao said that BarHop will explore arts-themed projects — both of performance art as well as arts and crafts.
“We found that people really enjoy making art and having an outlet to do so and an outlet of creativity, so we’ve been trying to integrate that into our programming this year,” Gao said. “The first couple weeks, we did a lot of cool art-making activities such as sand art and open mic live performances. Going forward, we’re going to try to push those interactive arts themes.”
