University of New England

Nexus
Madame Presidenta

By Anouar Majid, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair, Department of English

President Featherman doesn’t drink coffee. Think about this for a minute. Our departing leader attended hundreds of functions, worked seemingly endless days, drove around the state and flew across the country to meet potential donors, presided over graduation ceremonies in Maine and Israel, engineered the merging of two campuses, oversaw the restructuring of colleges and expansive building projects, agreed to the rebirth of traditional liberal arts programs, signifi cantly increased the University’s endowment and operating budget, and, most of all, dealt with faculty without being tempted by the powers of the dark bean.

"My God, she's powerful, that woman." - Anouar Majid, quoting a Mexican politician's comment after meeting Sandra in her office

And she might as well be a teetotaler – she almost never sets foot in Bacchus’ kingdom. Yet anyone who has met Sandra knows that she is a woman possessed of boundless energy. How does she do it? To ask is already to answer the question. She is simply a natural-born leader driven by unaided human passions, relying on her inner compass (and a slightly radical inclination) to act in the world. She doesn’t like false platitudes or vacuous sentimentality, speaks her mind fi rmly, puts her cards on the table (well, not all of them), but she never discourages responses. Granted, it’s not easy to be heard in her presence (presidents have their prerogatives), but she listens and pays attention. She may be thinking about a dozen things at once, but she does see through the fog and notes the things that matter.

I don’t recall exactly how I found myself in Sandra’s orbit, but the relationship that developed over her tenure has made a huge diff erence to me. Before I sat to pen down these words, I browsed through a series of photographs taken with the woman at various places in my recent academic journey. (Jacque Carter, the wise aide-de-camp and commandant, features prominently in them too.) Here we are at the U.S.S. Constitution Museum in Boston, for the opening of an exhibition on the Barbary Wars. My friend and colleague, Bob Allison, one of the best historians of this epoch and of Boston in general, graciously walked her – and us – through the exhibit. Th e trip to the museum was the fi rst I took with her – and Jacque.

The next time I saw her outside Maine was in Washington D.C., where she had been invited by the ambassador of Morocco to attend a party celebrating Morocco’s national day, followed by an invitation to dinner in a private club. I had been trying to convince Sandra that establishing a campus in Morocco might be good for us, as it could hand us a substantial market and spare us the tight competition in our overcrowded region. Just when I thought she had totally dismissed the idea, she accepted to explore the possibility. So there we were, outlining our plans to His Excellency Aziz Mekouar, one of the most impressive cosmopolitan men I have ever met, later to be granted UNE’s honorary Doctor of Laws degree. Both party and dinner were attended by my childhood friend, Mohammed Ariad, then economic attaché in charge of the free trade agreement mission that Morocco and the United States were hammering out.

After the dinner and goodbyes, the diplomats expressed utter enchantment with our president. I had seen the same reaction before, this time from a burly Mexican politician, husband of the director of a language institute in Oaxaca where we had been taking UNE students. A few months after the dinner in Washington, we headed to Morocco, landing fi rst in Casablanca, then driving to Marrakesh, before heading to Rabat, the capital, for talks with the minister of fi nance. Bernard, Sandra’s devoted husband, introduced her as Madame Presidenta. Close enough to French, I thought, so Sandra, representing UNE in the ministry’s boardroom, started in English, making full use of this Francophone Moroccan native for the translation. She spoke with the same authority exhibited on a daily basis in her offi ces in Stella Maris, explaining UNE’s goals and our expectations. Morocco’s purse keeper didn’t hesitate to express his delight at this venture and that, once we worked out the details with the Ministry of Higher Education and local authorities in Tangier, the site of the campus, we could then work out the fi nancial details. I couldn’t help marveling at how circumstances brought me into negotiations with the Moroccan government as a member of Sandra’s team, a Moroccan native representing an American university. She didn’t stay long enough to meet with the minister of higher education (he has since been replaced in a cabinet shuffl e), but her spirit hovered over us, as Jacque led the next round of talks.

Busy as she was, she took the time to write her impressions of Morocco and publish them in Tingis, a Moroccan-American magazine of ideas. I have read all the articles published in this magazine, and many others written about Morocco, but in Sandra’s piece I could find new insights and intriguing comparisons. In all the time I have taken people to Morocco, I have never met someone with a sharper sense of observation. It is this eye for detail, talent for narrating complex visual scenes, artistic sensibility, passion for culture, and political acumen, combined with an unshakable faith in her country’s largesse, that have given Sandra the personality for which she is now universally admired. It’s not that she is without fault. It’s hard to be an academic leader and be perfect, but what sets her apart is her genuinely democratic spirit. We talked and argued over many lunches, but there were no bitter aftermaths. Sometimes we carried on long after the cafeteria had been deserted, then walked out into the fresh ocean breeze to temper the heat.

What will Sandra do next? In addition to chairing and advising organizations (if she so chooses), she could teach, write political treatises, try fi ction or a memoir, or perhaps she could summon her patient muses to paint and add beauty to the world. Sandra may be a mighty chief, but she is also a kid at heart, a young artist from Philadelphia dazzled by the world around her. Wherever she goes from here, her brilliant legacy will be engraved in UNE’s collective memory. She will be remembered as the president who has led two small colleges, separated by age, culture, and distance, to a unifi ed and richer University.

I predict more lunches and conversations in our future, so I won’t close on a goodbye note. I will just raise my cup and say, Viva Madame Presidenta!

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