REPORT FROM THE APRIL EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE & BOARD OF TRUSTEES MEETINGS

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 28-29, in Boston, MA.

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 17), which will come to an end on June 30, and approving the budget for the upcoming fiscal year (FY 18), which starts on July 1. The FY 17 budget is balanced – indeed, almost perfectly so, as we imagine ending the year with just a small surplus of $239.34! For FY 18, the Board approved a balanced budget of just over $2,220,000.

As I remarked in my report after the April 2015 and April 2016 Board meetings, 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 we have received for ASOR’s Cultural Heritage Initiatives (CHI). This funding includes monies that comes via our cooperative agreement with the United States Department of State and also from the J. M. Kaplan Fund and the Whiting Foundation, with in-kind support from the Getty Conservation Institute, The World Monuments Fund, and Arnold and Porter, LLC.

More specifically, we were very pleased to receive a letter, about three weeks before the Board meeting, indicating that the Department of State intended to award us $900,000 to continue for a third year our collaborative “Safeguarding the Heritage of the Near East Initiative.” This new Department of State funding runs from March 31, 2017, through March 31, 2018.

As we noted in the press release that we sent to all of our members regarding this funding—we are particularly pleased that this new agreement allows us not only to continue our efforts preserve and protect the cultural heritage of Syria and Iraq, but also to extend the scope of work to include the preservation and protection of the cultural heritage of Libya. We are also very pleased that this new cooperative agreement includes increased support for in-country projects that connect local communities to historic places and heritage. For more, see as always, the ASOR CHI website.

In addition, I was pleased and proud to be able to announce to the Board at its April meeting that ASOR had been awarded a one-year, $244,000 grant from the Whiting Foundation, to fund an emergency assessment and digital preservation initiative for textual collections and repositories in Mosul. The texts to be assessed include Islamic manuscripts (folia, quires, codices, scrolls) from the rich holdings of the Mosul Central Library System, the Mosul University Library System, the Library of the Mosul Museum, and other, smaller textual repositories within Mosul, as well as cuneiform tablets, architectural and monumental inscriptions, and inscribed objects.

The grant, moreover, will pay to train local heritage professionals to conduct the assessment and preservation program. These Whiting monies thus provides not only for the preserving and protecting of Mosul’s intellectual and cultural legacy, but also for the empowerment and for the enhanced financial well-being of ASOR’s Iraqi members, colleagues, and friends.

The ASOR Office

ASOR learned in January 2016 that Boston University proposed to sell a block of nine buildings that it then owned in Kenmore Square, including 656 Beacon Street, where ASOR (and also the Archaeological Institute of America) had office space. These buildings subsequently were sold in August 2016, to a major real estate developer.

In neither case, was this information communicated to us by Boston University; rather, we learned it by reading BU’s daily e-newsletter. This means we received no concrete information from BU about what this sale would mean for us, although we heard through the grapevine that things would probably move slowly and that we would have until March 2018 to find new space.

But this is not what happened. As I wrote to the Board on March 16, 2017, we heard that afternoon from Ann Cudd, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University, that ASOR would have to vacate its offices at 656 Beacon Street by May 31, 2017. We did quickly decide that it was to our benefit to remain in the Boston area (and, ideally, within the BU geographical orbit) for the immediate future for several reasons, the most important being that this location serves our staff well, and the idea of moving somewhere inaccessible to our staff – and so facing the prospect of losing both our office space and our employees at the end of May – was unimaginable.

At the Board meeting on April 29th, I was able to report to the Board that we had identified two separate spaces very near our current offices in Kenmore Square to lease, one at 650 Beacon Street to house core ASOR staff and be the base for core ASOR functions; the other, .2 miles away, at 665 Beacon Street, to house the staff member who services the American Center for Oriental Research (ACOR) and the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI) and to store documents and related materials that belong to ACOR and CAARI. This space could also house the Journal Exchange Program that ASOR runs on behalf of ACOR, CAARI, and AIAR. It could in addition be used by ASOR for storage and for some of its cultural heritage work.

Over the next month, we did secure leases for these two spaces – although it went down to the wire (we finally received a lease for 650 Beacon Street on May 26th, the Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend, for a move scheduled for Tuesday, May 30)! That lease also came with an unexpected and very unwelcome surprise: a lease period extending only to December 31, 2017, instead of December 31, 2018, as we had anticipated. It is in addition important to note that we have to pay rent for these two spaces, as opposed to the complimentary office space that Boston University has provided us for the last twenty years.

These are big changes for ASOR, of course—and, obviously, since we have a lease for 650 Beacon Street that runs only through December 31, 2017, there are more changes that are soon to come. We do have a “New Office Committee” in place, made up of six members of our Board and chaired by our Board Chair, Richard Coffman. This committee has been working diligently since last November, and continues to work, on the issue of ASOR’s next home.

But we all can help. Right now, we need suggestions, ideas, proposals, from all our members. Do you know of office space (we need about 2500-3000 square feet) available near or on a college, university, or seminary campus that ASOR might be able to rent at a reasonable cost (or, even better, space that is free)? Do you know philanthropists in your community who might like to support ASOR’s work by providing free or reduced-rent office space? Or maybe you want to give us a building. (Hey, it never hurts to ask!)

Some Happier News

The Board’s discussion of the ASOR office situation was, obviously, a difficult one, but we were able to follow it up with a preview of the new ASOR website, which is due to launch any day now. Everyone of the Board spoke enthusiastically of the design, and we hope all our members will enjoy it as well.

The Board also was pleased to hear very good news about the 2017 ASOR Annual Meeting, from the Programs Committee, which reported that it had received nearly 700 abstract submissions for the 2017 Annual Meeting program. This is as opposed to 540 abstract submissions for 2016. Because one must be a member to present at the Annual Meeting, the significant increase in abstracts submitted for 2017 has helped drive an increase in the number of ASOR members, currently about 1800 individuals (at about this time last year, the number was 1700).

In addition, the Board welcomed three new colleagues: Debra Foran, Heather Dana Davis Parker, and Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis. We’re very happy to have these new colleagues on our Board!

Overall, the Board and Executive Committee had a busy set of meetings—but also a productive one. Even though I am worried about ASOR’s home going forward, I left the Boston meetings thankful, as I always am, for all that ASOR’s Board members do to ensure that ASOR continues to thrive.