[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 1 (Wednesday, January 5, 2011)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E7-E9]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              MARDEE XIFARAS: SOUTHCOAST WOMAN OF THE YEAR

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. BARNEY FRANK

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                       Wednesday, January 5, 2011

  Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, the New Bedford Standard 
Times, an excellent newspaper, regularly recognizes leaders of the 
community that it serves by designating a SouthCoast Woman of the Year 
and a SouthCoast Man of the Year. This year's SouthCoast Woman of the 
Year is an extraordinary person, who is a leader in so many fields of 
endeavor that I think the Standard Times must have been tempted to call 
her ``Women of the Year.''
  MarDee Xifaras is an able attorney, who has been a leader 
politically, economically, educationally, and in civic affairs in 
general. Most recently she has been a spearhead in getting the State of 
Massachusetts to take over the Southern New England Law School, 
creating for the first time in Massachusetts a state university law 
school, to the great benefit of the population of that area, and I 
believe to the practice of law in Massachusetts, by providing a source 
of socially-conscious graduates for years to come.
  MarDee Xifaras is an extraordinary force for a wide range of good 
causes, and I am delighted that she has been recognized by the New 
Bedford Standard Times, but not surprised. I've had the benefit of her 
advice, counsel and friendship, as did my late and much-missed 
predecessor, Gary Studds, whose work in this body benefitted enormously 
from her input, as has mine.
  Mr. Speaker, as an example of what citizenship is at its best, at a 
time when we very much need that, I ask that the New Bedford Standard 
Times article about Woman of the Year MarDee Xifaras be printed here.

[[Page E8]]

                [From SouthCoastToday.com, Jan. 2, 2011]

              MarDee Xifaras: SouthCoast Woman of the Year

                           (By Jack Spillane)

       A bogus study pretending to be an independent report. Last-
     minute telephone calls from an incumbent governor twisting 
     arms.
       The smearing of a small law school's reputation by people 
     on the boards of competing larger schools.
       And ultimately, the slurring of an entire region of the 
     state as not having enough of a talent pool to merit a public 
     law school.
       Margaret ``MarDee'' Xifaras dealt with every conceivable 
     insult and underhanded political tactic when it came to the 
     unsuccessful 2004-2005 fight to merge the Southern New 
     England School of Law with the University of Massachusetts 
     Dartmouth. But she did not get down into the gutter with her 
     opponents.
       Instead, Xifaras, the then-chairman of the SNESL board of 
     trustees, went hack to work running the small, private 
     Dartmouth law school in the same determined way that it had 
     operated for more than two decades.
       She also went to work leading the effort to meticulously 
     document the legal and financial case that would make a 2009-
     2010 effort to absorb the school into UMass Dartmouth 
     unassailable.
       MarDee Xifaras' leadership achieved what very few 
     SouthCoast political or public officials of any kind have 
     done over the last half century. She went up against the 
     state's Boston-centric power establishment and won.
       And she won hands down.
       For her efforts coordinating the campaign to establish a 
     state law school in Massachusetts, a school that has now been 
     located in Southeastern Massachusetts, Margaret D. Xifaras is 
     the 2010 Standard-Times SouthCoast Woman of the Year.
       Nominations for the award came from the community and 
     members of the newspaper staff. Recipients were selected by a 
     newsroom committee.


                            LEARNING LESSONS

       ``Out of the '04, '05 negativity and bad experience, came 
     some lessons,'' Xifaras remembered of that first law school 
     fight.
       The impulse of some might have been to sue the private law 
     schools--Suffolk University and New England School of Law--
     that coordinated the effort to prevent UMass from competing 
     with them.
       Instead, Xifaras waited for an opportune time when the 
     numbers worked for the establishment of a state law school. 
     And then she coordinated with SNESL Dean Robert Ward and 
     UMass Dartmouth Chancellor Jean MacCormack to devise a new 
     financing plan under which the state law school would be a 
     self-sustaining arm of the university, needing no assistance 
     from the government.
       Both savvy and practical, Xifaras hired O'Neil & 
     Associates, the state's best-wired P.R. firm to help her 
     navigate the state's notoriously provincial political waters. 
     She also kept an eye on her own governing board, re-
     documenting for them once again the case as to why SNESL 
     donating $23.5 million worth of its own assets to the state 
     made sense for the school's development in the long run.
       Xifaras' skill in coalition-building ultimately helped 
     UMass and SNESL build an iron-clad case that convinced 
     Secretary of Education Paul Reville, Commissioner of Higher 
     Education Richard Freeland, and finally Gov. Deval Patrick 
     himself that a UMass law school was the right thing to do.
       In effect, they convinced the powers-that-be to give access 
     to legal education to middle- and working-class students 
     previously disenfranchised in Massachusetts. And they 
     convinced them that the most cost-effective way to do it was 
     by accepting SNESL's existing Dartmouth campus as a donation.
       ``If there's anything we were over the years, it was 
     determined,'' said Xifaras.


                           THE STUDENT FACTOR

       Xifaras and the UMass and SNESL boards had one more huge 
     asset: the SNESL students themselves --the primarily working- 
     and middle-class students who had risen up 25-odd years 
     ago, and with the help of interested area lawyers, created 
     a fledgling law school out of little more than their own 
     imaginations and desire.
       After being victimized by the 2005 stealth political 
     campaign, the SNESL Student Bar Association hired one of the 
     school's most successful graduates, Lee Blais, and sued 
     Suffolk University, along with a onetime official of the 
     Romney administration.
       They sued for nothing less than public corruption.
       They charged that Suffolk and a former Romney official 
     turned lobbyist, Charles Chieppo, had colluded to try to keep 
     the proposed UMass law school from competing with a lower-
     priced public school.
       And though the case was never settled, the Board of Higher 
     Education as much as admitted wrongdoing in the merger 
     application process. It agreed to write a ``letter of 
     understanding'' pledging the state to a fair, rigorous and 
     documentable process when, and if SNESL and UMass ever tried 
     to unite again.
       ``They succeeded because of the basic unfairness, and 
     violation of due process that occurred,'' Xifaras said.
       And because of the tenacity of the students and their 
     lawyer.
       ``We didn't allow ourselves to get out-litigated,'' Xifaras 
     said.
       ``Lee Blais, at every turn was doing depositions, fighting 
     back motions to dismiss, fighting back motions for dismissal 
     for lack of standing.''
       Blais may have been taking the depositions, but it was 
     Xifaras, according to Blais, who was the general planning the 
     battle.
       ``She's someone who can plot out a strategy and implement a 
     strategy,'' he said. ``She's one of the most effective 
     leaders I've ever met.''
       Blais also credited Xifaras with having the necessary 
     political skills and vision.
       She understood the politics of the state of Massachusetts--
     who could help and who couldn't, what would work and what 
     wouldn't, he said.
       Further, she understood the great rationale for a public 
     law school itself in Massachusetts--a school that could focus 
     on the need for lawyers to devote some segment of their 
     careers to public service.
       ``Her skills, not only in the area of politics, but in the 
     area of public policy, are just incredible,'' Blais said.


                          the political maven

       Robert Ward, the longtime dean of SNESL, said Xifaras 
     recommended a key change in approach for the second 
     application.
       It would be all about UMass and the need for a public law 
     school, and not about addressing SNESL's need for American 
     Bar Association accreditation (a process that usually demands 
     the resources of a larger school.) ``That subtle twist is the 
     kind of thing that really good lawyers do,'' said Ward. ``You 
     look into the dominant narrative and, you sort of find a way 
     to tell your story in a way that resonates.''
       At the time of the second merger application, the nation 
     was consumed by a large debate over health insurance, Xifaras 
     noted, and whether there should be ``a public option'' for 
     health insurance. In the same way, she decided, UMass would 
     argue for a public option for an affordable legal education.
       Xifaras said the SNESL board had been inspired by the 
     establishment of the state medical school in Worcester 40 
     years ago, also for students of limited means. And in 2009, 
     the time was ripe for making an argument that Massachusetts 
     needed an affordable, public law school, a school that, like 
     UMass Medical, would train lawyers to dedicate at least part 
     of their careers to public service.
       Already, the new public law school has awarded 35 
     scholarships for that purpose.
       ``It was up to MarDee to rethink the rationale of going 
     forward,'' Ward said.
       ``There has to be someone to find the right note. And that, 
     again--because of her political savvy--that's what 
     happened,'' he said.
       UMass Dartmouth Chancellor Jean MacCormack said that while 
     it was clear that SNESL's $23.5 million campus and 
     experienced law-school faculty offered an opportunity to the 
     university, the university brought to SNESL the size and the 
     resources necessary to win accreditation.
       But Xifaras' charisma and political skills, MacCormack 
     said, allowed the vision to happen. ``She's incredibly 
     optimistic in the face of huge obstacles,'' she said.
       And the dividends of the state law school being located in 
     Southeastern Massachusetts will be even more apparent in the 
     future, MacCormack predicted.
       ``This is going to be a legacy activity,'' she said. 
     ``You're going to see more people coming to the South Coast. 
     Already, of these students, 50 percent of them come from out 
     of state.''


                           A PERSONAL BATTLE

       Winning the battle to establish a state law school was 
     impressive under any circumstances, but few knew that Xifaras 
     won it while beating back a flare-up of the breast cancer she 
     first defeated some 14 years ago.
       Xifaras, 65, is amazingly matter-of-fact about her life-or-
     death battles.
       Although she admits to some personal, private moments of 
     emotion, in the end, she said she simply didn't want to waste 
     time or energy feeling sorry for herself.
       She just did what needed to be done with the cancer--on the 
     first round she had chemotherapy, radiation therapy and a 
     stem-cell transplant--and last year, she bad two more nodes 
     removed.
       Xifaras maintains a busy work schedule that's complemented 
     not just by her effort to establish the law school, but by 
     her longtime work as a sought-after political operative for 
     the Democratic Party.
       She has played key campaign management roles in the 
     presidential efforts of everyone from Ted Kennedy to John 
     Kerry to Barack Obama, not to mention local political efforts 
     like the congressional campaigns of Paul and Niki Tsongas.
       On top of all that, Xifaras works in a busy law practice 
     (she's one of Mayor Scott Lang's law partners), and fills in 
     as grandma for her daughter Amy, a law school student with a 
     four-month old.
       By the way, that's a throwback to Xifaras' own career when 
     back in the mid-1970s she used to put in 10-plus hour days 
     traveling back and forth to Boston University law school, 
     while she had two children still in diapers and one who was 
     in pre-school.
       ``I think back on it--if this alternative (a local law 
     school) had been available to me at that time, clearly I 
     would have gone,'' she said.
       Xifaras said she didn't need to attend a big-name school 
     for the public-service career she had in mind. She needed a 
     school like UMass Law.
       ``My orientation was always more of a community-based 
     orientation. Doing regular work for regular folks in a 
     terrific, down-to-earth setting,'' she said.

[[Page E9]]

                         BELOVED BY HER PEOPLE

       If you ask the people who've worked closely with MarDee 
     Xifaras how she pulled off leading the charge for the state 
     law school, or any of her other impressive life 
     accomplishments, they'll tell you she just has this 
     remarkable ability to ``connect'' with people.
       By the way, Xifaras has also been a Peace Corps volunteer 
     in Africa; a fellow at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at 
     Tufts; an MBA from UMass Dartmouth; a grassroots political 
     organizer and one of the moving forces behind Gerry Studds' 
     first anti-war campaign for Congress.
       Xifaras is startlingly, and charmingly, straightforward. 
     She seems to understand that human beings are not perfect 
     entities, and she has the ability to meet them where they 
     live and inspire them to be better.
       ``It is the privilege of a lifetime to work with her,'' 
     Ward said; ``The quality of my life improved dramatically 
     when I met her.''
       Jay Lynch, Xifaras' vice chairman on the SNESL board, said 
     that often it was only Xifaras' personal connections that 
     kept the public law school dream alive.
       ``She never gave up on it,'' he said.
       Xifaras succeeds, Lynch said, because she reaches people. 
     She never badmouths folks, even opponents--either in public 
     or in private--he noted.
       ``I think it was her unique ability to connect with 
     everyone involved,'' he said.
       Perhaps the most impressive endorsement comes from Michelle 
     Keith, a 2009 graduate of SNESL, and one of the mid-life law 
     students for whom Xifaras seems to have fashioned the public 
     law school.
       Keith met Xifaras at a Women's Bar Association event, one 
     of the many ongoing community events that Xifaras has made 
     sure take place at SNESL over the years.
       Keith, a homemaker who had home-schooled her two children; 
     said she went to SNESL because she loves both Greater New 
     Bedford and the school's public service ethic.
       She passed the bar on her first try.
       She compares MarDee Xifaras to George Bailey in the 
     Christmas film classic ``It's a Wonderful Life,'' And she 
     calls SNESL the ``Savings and Loan'' bank that, in the 
     classic movie, granted mortgages to low-income and middle-
     class people.
       Xifaras, Keith said, really looks out for the school's 
     students and advocates with them for public service to the 
     community.
       ``There's a lot of successful people out there, but they go 
     about it without any sense of honor,'' she said.
       MarDee ``has an inherent sense of honor and that's rare.''

                          ____________________