EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE AND BOARD BOARD OF TRUSTEES MEETING REPORT
Susan Ackerman
ASOR President
In addition to all the great academic sessions that took place during ASOR’s 2015 Annual Meeting, the ASOR Executive Committee and Board of Trustees met, as they always do, to engage in discussions and undertake items of business on behalf of the organization.
Business Items
1. The Treasurer’s Report. A major item of business for both the Executive Committee and the Board of Trustees at each of its meetings is to hear a report from Richard Coffman, the ASOR Treasurer, and, in the context of that report, to assess the financial health of ASOR. The news is very good. ASOR yet again ran a balanced budget for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2015 (FY 15); indeed, we ended the year with a $51,000 surplus. ASOR is in an excellent financial position in other respects, as the total value of all our financial accounts for FY 15 was $2,415,579, up 15.19% from FY 14. Moreover, the value of ASOR’s investment accounts increased by 7.12% in FY 15.
Yet while the return on ASOR’s investment accounts is gratifying, we cannot count on the stock market to consistently generate revenue for the ASOR budget. Nor can we regularly count on the support our FY 15 budget enjoyed from the indirect costs recovered from our Cultural Heritage Initiatives funding. Thus, the slight dips in income from our most reliable revenue stream, memberships and subscriptions, following on similar dips in memberships and subscriptions revenue in FY 14, is a matter of concern, and we continue to look for ways to sustain and even grow our membership and subscription base. For example, the Membership and Outreach Committee, in conjunction with the ASOR staff, is looking at ways to redefine member benefits to make membership more attractive. We know ASOR thrives best through the support of its dedicated members, and ASOR is in turn working to support its members, both individual and institutional, through benefits that best repay their dedication.
2. Internationalization. As just noted, ASOR’s Membership and Outreach Committee is looking at ways to redefine member benefits to make membership more attractive; the Committee, moreover, is looking at ways to enhance ASOR’s engagement with our increasingly large community of international members (about 22% of our membership, from 35 counties outside North America). Other committees have taken up this challenge as well, and at its meeting, the ASOR Board of Trustees was extremely pleased to be able to ratify the vote taken by the ASOR Committee on Archaeological Research and Policy (CAP) that extends the opportunity to become a CAP-affiliated excavation or publication project to ASOR’s international members. The Board very much looks forward to supporting CAP as it implements this new policy, and we commend CAP for the careful and detailed discussions over the years that have informed its decision and led it to make this momentous change.
3. Welcomes and Farewells. Another item of business that the Board of Trustees regularly takes up in November is to say goodbye to Board members whose term of service has ended. These include individual member Catherine Duff; institutional member Barry Gittlen; and Board-designated trustee Sheldon Fox. All of these individuals have rendered tremendous services to the Board: by giving generously of their expertise and wisdom; through their work on various Board committees; through magnanimous donations and other gifts in kind; and because of their friendship and good cheer. We will miss them all, even as we welcome new colleagues to the Board. These include Jane DeRose Evans, who joins the Board as a new individual trustee, and Jeff Blakely, who joins the Board as a new institutional trustee. Moreover, Individual Trustee Ann-Marie Knoblauch was elected to another term on the Board, as was Institutional Trustee Ed Wright. ASOR also has a new Board-designated trustee, Peyton (Randy) Helm.
Randy was elected, as are all Board-designated trustees, through a vote at the Board of Trustees meeting. But Jane, Ann-Marie, Jeff, and Ed were elected by the membership in ASOR’s first-ever on-line election, a change in procedure the Board approved at its April 2015 meeting. Our goal was to enfranchise more members in the voting process – for example, members who do not come to the Annual Meeting and so are unable to vote in elections conducted there. The change seems to have been successful: when compared to those who voted in last year’s election that was held at the Members’ Meeting, about three times as many institutional representatives voted online and about four times as many individual members. We still have a ways to go: only about one-third of institutional members voted, and only about one-fifth of individual members – and we’d like to eventually see an enfranchisement rate of, say, 50%. But we’re moving in the right direction!
Discussion Items
1. The ASOR Strategic Plan. The current ASOR Strategic Plan has guided ASOR well during last five years: 2011-2015. In order to update it with a Strategic Plan for the next five year period, from 2016-2020, I established a Strategic Planning Task Force last fall, just before the 2014 Annual Meeting. The members of that Task Force are Susan Ackerman (Chair), Gary Arbino, Vivian Bull, Richard Coffman, Sharon Herbert, Ann-Marie Knoblauch, Øystein LaBianca, Heather Parker, B. W. Ruffner, Frederick Winter, and J. Edward Wright.
In 2014-2015, the Task Force convened for face-to-face meetings four times, and we have communicated frequently via e-mail. We have developed successive iterations of, first, a working document and then a draft Strategic Plan, which we shared with the ASOR Board of Trustees at its April 2014 meeting, the ASOR Executive Committee at its October 2015 meeting, and the ASOR Chairs Coordinating Council, in its May, October, and November 2015 conference calls and at its meeting in Atlanta. We also asked the Chairs of our various committees to share the parts of the draft that most pertain to their committees’ mandates with their committee members for discussion at the 2015 Annual Meeting, and we circulated a draft to the entire ASOR membership for comment via the November 3, 2015, issue of News@ASOR: see https://www.asor.org/news/2015/11/strategic-plan-new-draft.html.
The Board also devoted a part of its Sunday meeting in Atlanta to meeting with members of the Strategic Planning Task Force and discussing its reactions to the current draft. The discussions were vibrant, and the Board’s comments were, as always, extremely thorough and thoughtful. More important, from the Task Force’s point of view, the comments – both from the Board and from other constituencies within ASOR – were generally affirming, and while the Task Force is currently making some revisions to the Strategic Plan based on the feedback we have received, we feel confident that after making those revisions, sharing them again with ASOR’s standing committees and the larger membership for response, and revising once more, we will have a final version of the plan ready to present to the Board for its consideration and potential ratification in April 2016. If we are then able to achieve the goals detailed in the plan, then by 2020, ASOR will be an even stronger organization than it is today, especially because of its support of twenty-first century scholarship; its diverse membership; its successful educational outreach; and its achievements in heritage protection, preservation, and presentation.
2. ASOR’s Cultural Heritage Initiatives.One program at ASOR that is particularly thriving is our relatively new work in Cultural Heritage Initiatives (CHI) – see http://www.asor-syrianheritage.org/. As ASOR members will remember, we began our Cultural Heritage Initiatives program (then called the Syrian Heritage Initiative) in August 2014, when we signed a one-year cooperative agreement with the United States Department of State to monitor damage to cultural heritage sites in Syria, to increase global awareness about this damage, and to make recommendations regarding post-conflict restoration projects that might be undertaken. The funding for this initial cooperative agreement was for $600,000, but a scant two months later, in October 2014, that amount increased to $756,000, in order that we might expand our mandate to monitor damage to cultural heritage in the parts of northern Iraq that had fallen under ISIL’s control. This September, we renewed our cooperative agreement for a second year, with $900,000 in funding. We have also received support for our Cultural Heritage Initiatives work from the J. M. Kaplan Fund and in-kind support from the Getty Conservation Institute, The World Monuments Fund, and Arnold and Porter, LLC.
Moreover, in August, we learned that ASOR and the AIA had jointly been awarded a $30,000 Chairman’s Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to help fund a two-day conference in Washington, D.C., on December 10-11, 2015. Our goal was for ASOR and the AIA to play a leadership role in bringing together different U.S.-based and international organizations that, like ASOR, are working on issues concerning cultural heritage in Syria and northern Iraq, to ask how we might encourage cooperation among these groups so that we might compliment (rather than needlessly duplicate) each other’s work.
I am proud of the recognition that our work on cultural heritage degradation and destruction in Syria and northern Iraq is bringing ASOR. Indeed, just before our Annual Meeting began, the CHI’s Academic Director Michael Danti testified before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade on behalf of ASOR Cultural Heritage Initiatives. The Board was very pleased to receive a copy of the written statement that Michael prepared for the House Subcommittee in conjunction with his testimony and also very pleased to be able to hear a report directly from Michael during the Board meeting regarding the testimony and how it went.
3. The ASOR Website. The ASOR website, which in its current iteration dates from 2007, is badly in need of upgrading – if for no other reason than the fact that the technology that supports the site is so obsolete that our staff has to dig through archives of old operating manuals to keep it functioning. At its meeting the Board looked at some prototypes for a new website design and talked more generally about some of its goals and aspirations for the website.
Ultimately, the Board charged the Strategic Planning Task Force – because the Task Force is currently the body in ASOR that is most deeply engaged in thinking about ASOR’s work and identity going forward – with serving as a committee that should work, first, with a branding consultant and then a web designer to develop a new ASOR website, as well as updated versions of other public presentations of ASOR’s “image” (business cards, stationery, etc.). The Task Force is meeting in late January to begin this work, and we hope to have an interim report ready for the Board by its April meeting.
4. The Overseas Research Centers. At the conclusion of its meeting, the Board was pleased to hear reports, as it always does, from the various overseas research centers: the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI); the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research (AIAR) in Jerusalem; and the American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR) in Amman. This was the first meeting in which we were joined by a new representative from the Albright, J. P. Dessel; also CAARI has a new president and so a new representative to the ASOR Board, Bryan Wilkins. In addition to the welcomes extended to new Board members that are noted above, we extend a hearty welcome to J.P. and Bryan and best wishes to Bryan in his new position!
