ASOR IS ON THE MOVE
By Susan Ackerman, ASOR President
ASOR members may remember that we reported in the June 6, 2017, edition of News@ASOR that the ASOR offices had moved. This move was necessary because our old office building, which was part of the Boston University campus and where we had been granted complimentary office space by BU for the past twenty years, had been sold to a real estate developer, who required us to vacate.
We vacated to space just down the street
—from our old offices at 656 Beacon Street to space at 650 Beacon Street. But we knew when we moved last June that this move was only temporary, as 650 Beacon Street is owned by the same real estate developer who bought 656 Beacon and is a building that is slated, like 656 Beacon Street, for redevelopment, beginning at some point in late 2018.
The ASOR Board, advised by the Board’s New Office Committee (chaired by our Board Chair Richard Coffman), thus entered into extensive discussions regarding the best long-term plan for ASOR. This, we have determined, is to purchase a facility to serve as ASOR’s permanent and independent home. The Board has also determined, again through extensive discussion and through site visits, that the optimal location for our new office is in the Washington, D.C., area.
This decision is based on our conviction that a Washington-based location would best support ASOR’s program goals. ASOR’s scholarly work, for example, is necessarily interdisciplinary—not only because we facilitate the work of scholars across disciplines such as archaeology, cultural heritage, history, and linguistics, but because these disciplines are inherently interdisciplinary. Office space in the Washington, D.C., area will further ASOR’s interdisciplinary engagement by providing opportunities for regular contact with colleagues from like-minded learned societies that are also Washington-based, including the American Anthropological Association, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, the American Historical Association, the American Research Center in Egypt, the National Geographic Society, and the Society for American Archaeology. Office space in Washington also offers us opportunities for academic and administrative contact with key higher-education associations that help foster (among other things) the scholarship for which ASOR is known: the American Council on Education, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Association of American Universities, and the Council of Independent Colleges.
In addition, office space in the Washington, D.C., area will allow ASOR’s cultural heritage team—who have worked since 2014 to document and raise global awareness about damage to cultural heritage sites in war-torn regions of North Africa and the Middle East, through funding provided primarily by the U.S. Department of State—to work more closely with our State Department colleagues and also our allies at the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Alliance, and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC). Proximity to Washington’s foreign embassies will also benefit ASOR because of the critical role these embassies play in approving and facilitating the U.S.-based, ASOR-affiliated archaeological excavations, field surveys, and other projects that take place overseas.
Within the Washington area, we have tentatively identified Alexandria, VA—where many other non-profit organizations are located and an easy commute to downtown Washington—as the site of ASOR’s potential new home. Twice in the last two months, I, our Executive Director, and two other officers have met with a Washington-based commercial realtor to confirm that there are appropriate properties in Alexandria that are within our price range. We have also confirmed that the legal aspects of the purchase and establishment of our operations in the Washington area will be handled by ASOR’s pro bono law firm, Arnold and Porter, LLC, which is located in Washington, D.C.
Our plan going forward is to rent office space in Alexandria come June 1, 2018, as we begin relocating our office to this new location and as we continue to identify potential properties that we might buy. We also plan to retain our current Boston staff and continue running some of our operations out of Boston through December 31, 2018, for the sake of continuity and so that we might continue to benefit from our staff’s significant expertise and long-term experience in managing ASOR. We have in addition offered our current staff the opportunity to move with us, although, right now, none of them intends to pursue that possibility.
These are big changes for ASOR—and as with all big changes, there are feelings of sadness and loss, as we say goodbye to our long-time Boston home and, more important, to our devoted Boston staff. There is also still a lot to discuss, and many decisions are still in the offing.
But the biggest decision has been made—to purchase a new and permanent home for ASOR in the Washington, D.C., area—and it is an exciting one. ASOR’s first office, established in 1900, was one large room in a Jerusalem hotel. During the succeeding 118 years, we have dramatically expanded our scholarly capacity and public outreach. A permanent home for ASOR is the logical next step for our organization. This office space will transform ASOR, taking us to a new level, as we work to dig deeper and deeper into the past to accomplish more and more in the future.
Image taken from washington.org.
