EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE & BOARD OF TRUSTEES MEETING REPORT
Susan Ackerman
ASOR President
Every spring, the ASOR Board of Trustees and the Board’s Executive Committee meet to engage in discussions and undertake items of business that have come forward since the Executive Committee’s and Board’s gatherings at the November Annual Meeting. This year, the Executive Committee and the Board met during the weekend of April 17-18, in Houston, TX. Our meetings – along with the meetings of the Boards of the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research (AIAR) and the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI) – were graciously hosted by ASOR Trustee Mark Lanier. On Friday and Saturday, Mark made available to us meeting spaces in his gorgeous Lanier Theological Library, and he and his wife Becky treated us to a gala dinner at their home on Saturday night, April 18. The setting was stunning – especially compared to our usual “digs” in some hotel meeting room. We are very grateful to Mark and Becky for the gracious hospitality they extended to the ASOR, AIAR, and CAARI Boards in Houston, and this on top of everything else Mark does for ASOR.
The ASOR Budget. The major item on the agenda for the ASOR Board’s spring meetings is always the budget, both a review of the budget for the current fiscal year (FY 15), which will come to an end on June 30, and approving the budget for the upcoming fiscal year (FY 16), which starts on July 1. The FY 15 budget is balanced – indeed, almost perfectly so, as we imagine ending the year with just a small $1,289 surplus. For FY 16, the Board approved a budget of just over $2,000,000.
This is a rather astonishing figure for ASOR, given that as recently as FY 12, ASOR’s annual budget was $965,000. The reason for this dramatic increase is the funding for ASOR’s Syrian Heritage Initiative (SHI) that comes via our cooperative agreement with the United States Department of State. The funding the State Department has extended to ASOR, moreover, had continued to grow. Initially, in August 2014, we received $600,000, to be spent over a twelve-month period (which in reality stretched to slightly longer) to work on three key issues concerning Syrian cultural heritage: (1) to document the damage being done to cultural heritage in Syria; (2) to promote global awareness of the extent of the damage; and (3) to plan emergency and post-war responses for mitigation and preservation. For more, see as always, http://www.asor-syrianheritage.org/.
In September 2014, shortly after our cooperative agreement with the State Department had begun, we were asked – and awarded $156,000 in additional funding – to extend our work into the areas of northern Iraq not under the control of the Baghdad government, in order to consider, especially, the destruction of cultural heritage at the hands of ISIL. Again, this funding was to be spent within the same twelve-month period as specified for the initial funding of $600,000. Earlier this spring, however, we were asked by the State Department to submit a proposal for continuing our work on Syria and Iraqi cultural heritage for two more years, through our FY 16 and FY 17. In its discussions last November, moreover, the Board expressed its support for the SHI and its interest in the project going forward beyond its original time frame if that were possible.
So, while the FY 16 and FY 17 funding from the Department of State is not yet secure nor guaranteed, the Board affirmed its November 2014 understanding that ASOR should go forward with the SHI if possible and so, in the hope of receiving FY 16 Department of State funds, approved the proposed $2,000,000 budget.
The ASOR Policy on Professional Conduct. Another very significant item of business that the Board undertook was to approve the final version of the ASOR Policy on Professional Conduct that has been under development for several years, in a process shepherded by the Ethics Working Group: Lynn Swartz Dodd (chair), Thomas Davis, Jane Evans, Marian Feldman, and Larry Herr. Many ASOR members will remember discussions regarding preliminary drafts of this proposed policy: at various sessions organized at the ASOR Annual Meeting (e.g., the “speed ethics” session hosted by the Working Group at the 2013 meeting and the discussion forum held during the Friday lunch hour of the 2014 meeting). ASOR members may also remember that the Working Group posted drafts of the proposed policy last fall (Fall 2014) and this winter (Winter 2015), through our News@ASOR newsletter, in order to solicit members’ comments. The Board has also regularly reviewed the work of the Ethics Working Group as it has gone forward, at each Board meeting since November 2012. In addition, the proposed ASOR Policy on Professional Conduct has been discussed several times by the Executive Committee and by the Chairs Coordinating Council, as well as by various of ASOR’s standing committees (especially CAP, COP, and the Program Committee).
The Working Group has, in short, been extremely diligent in soliciting feedback as it has worked its way through multiple iterations of the proposed ASOR Policy on Professional Conduct. The Working Group has, moreover, been extremely conscientious about incorporating that feedback as it has endeavored to develop a policy that takes all of ASOR’s multiple constituencies, and the multiplicity of views that can be found among those multiple constituencies, into account. The Board was thus very pleased to mark the end of this long process, and acknowledge the Working Group’s extremely hard work, by voting unanimously to approve the ASOR Policy on Professional Conduct. It takes effect immediately, meaning, for example, that the guidelines it sets forth are now binding on ASOR’s various governing committees. The Policy is posted on our website – at https://www.asor.org/about-asor/policies/policy-on-professional-conduct/ – and I urge all our members to review it. I also urge all ASOR members to join me in congratulating the Ethics Working Group on a job very, very well done.
Voting for Members of the ASOR Board of Trustees. Last November, at our meetings in San Diego, the ASOR Executive Committee began discussions about changing the way ASOR members vote for their representatives to the ASOR Board: both the way in which individual ASOR members vote for their representatives to the Board and the way institutional ASOR members vote for their representatives. At its April meeting, the Board approved the proposed changes, which would move us from the current system, where votes are cast at the annual Members’ Meeting that takes place at our Annual Meeting, to an online voting process that would take place before the Annual Meeting began.
The Board’s goal, in voting for this change, is to try to enfranchise more ASOR members: currently, because only ASOR members who attend the Annual Meeting and choose to attend the Members’ Meeting can vote, only 5% or so of our individual members vote in the elections for member representatives and only about 10% of institutional members vote in the elections for institutional Board representatives. Conversely, online voting – which our software system will guarantee will be completely confidential – will give all our members the opportunity to vote.
Like the new ASOR Policy on Professional Conduct, this new policy about voting takes effect immediately, and so it will be in place for the Fall 2015 elections.
Officer Elections. The current terms of three of ASOR’s officers – our Vice-President, Sharon Herbert, our Secretary, Lynn Swartz Dodd, and our Treasurer, Richard Coffman – end on December 31, 2015. On behalf of the Officers Nominating Committee, Joe Seger reported that all three of these officers had indicated they would be willing to serve a second term. The Board responded enthusiastically and unanimously re-elected Sharon, Lynn, and Richard to their positions for a second term, to run through December 31, 2018. I could not be more pleased: Sharon, Lynn, and Richard are all outstanding colleagues who do more than anyone could ask to make my job easy!
Concluding Reflections. One of our ASOR Board members, who is a veteran of Board service with many other organizations, once told me that he counts it as a successful Board meeting if a Board does one piece of meaningful work. By that measure, I think we can consider the Board meeting in Houston to have been very, very successful. My thanks again to Mark Lanier for all he did to make our meetings so productive, and, like all of you, I thank all of ASOR’s Board members for their service and all they do to ensure that ASOR continues to thrive.
