On March 17, Buena Vista University’s (BVU) Faculty Senate passed a proposal that changes the Academic and Cultural Events Series (ACES) requirements for students. The changes that will be going into effect the coming Fall 2016 semester are as follows:

1. Students will still be required to attend ACES events in order to graduate, but instead of earning a half credit per semester students will not earn any credit.
2. The number of required ACES will also be cut from eight to four per semester.
3. Students will still be required to complete four semesters of ACES.

According to Peter Steinfeld, Associate Dean of the Faculty, the decision to remove the credit for ACES has been discussed by faculty for awhile.

“[The] faculty had quite a number of questions, and they’ve had questions for a while, about whether the half-a-credit hour for attending eight events per semester is really a legitimate assignment of credit for merely going to sit and watch events,” Steinfeld said.

Steinfeld also said that prioritization and the cut in funding contributed to the changes in the ACES program. Since prioritization, funding for the ACES program has decreased from $150,000 to $90,000, which is a reduction of 40%.

These two factors combined led to the recent changes.

“Over the last several months, quite a bit of thought was given to figuring out what a good solution would be [to the cuts in funding] and also address questions that had been sort of ‘in the hopper’ for a while about the validity of the ACES program as a credit-bearing experience,” Steinfeld said.

The cuts in ACES events can also be attributed to the continuous rise in the price of bringing events to campus.

“The price of the big signature or cultural events continues to climb and the amount of money that we’ve had available over the last few years has remained almost identical over the years,” Steinfeld said.

This isn’t the first funding cut that the ACES program has faced.

The $150,000 budget was a decrease from previous years of $250,000. The earlier budget also included an ACES director, a position that has since been cut.

Steinfeld and his office now handle the job of the ACES director, a job with responsibilities including finding events to bring to campus and staying updated on what companies or people of interest are traveling through Iowa.

The ACES changes will require students to complete two cultural events and two scholarly. With the reduction in the number of ACES required per semester, the number of ACES events that are held will also decline. Steinfeld is hopeful that the smaller number of ACES events being held will enable BVU to spend more money on bigger events.

“There’s some disappointment, I think, that we couldn’t have found more money and made more money available to the ACES program because I there’s a general agreement that the ACES program is a strong and powerful program,” Steinfeld said.

“It’s a tragic loss and we’ll try to restore that piece of ACES in a limited fashion by bringing probably one or two of those [bigger events] per year.”