printable versionStaffers bid farewell to Jane Marcus
BY MICHAEL PEÑA
Jane Marcus
Jane Marcus, a longtime information technology employee who has devoted much of her career to helping the university's administrative staff stay on top of changes to central computing systems, retires on Friday after 31 years of service. Over that span, Marcus earned a PhD from the School of Education, helped faculty integrate computers into their teaching and sustained a network for staff across campus as the cornerstone of the Team to Improve Productivity at Stanford (TIPS).
Marcus joined TIPS in 1995 and has been a constant presence at its monthly meetings ever since. They are held on the third Wednesday of the month, so the Nov. 19 meeting will be her last. As the group's coordinator, Marcus has been responsible for convening the gatherings, facilitating discussions and publicizing TIPS and its mission through an e-mail list and word of mouth.
Her empathy for the rank and file and her institutional memory will probably be two of her most irreplaceable traits. Marcus first came to Stanford in 1977 as a temporary office assistant at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. After a year, she started graduate school, eventually earning a doctoral degree in administration and policy analysis, with a concentration on technology in education.
In 1979, Marcus secured a research assistantship with the university's information technology office, which was then called the Stanford Center for Information Processing. It was run by the same person overseeing an advisory group that had just been formed to study the future of computing at the university, which sounded similar to what Marcus wanted to research.
"I wanted to study the institutional implications of the integration of technology," Marcus said. "I wanted to look at the big picture and how it was going to change education."
Marcus obtained her degree in 1985, at which point she became a full-time employee. She said the decade that followed was an exciting time, when faculty members across campus were being trained on how to incorporate computers into everyday teaching. Particularly gratifying, Marcus said, was teaching the humanities faculty in the early '90s how to use Macintosh computers.
"It was all new, and it wasn't easy, and you had to make sure that people had the right technology and the right software and the right classrooms," Marcus said. "Computers were always for numbers, for counting things and analyzing things numerically."
TIPS was formed in 1988 to advise on the development of business applications. Since then, it has evolved into a grassroots network of administrators who share information with each other, as well as becoming the "go-to place for people who want to bring information to the administrative community."
In addition to presentations on workplace developments such as financial system updates and changes to e-mail, TIPS invites speakers from across campus to give presentations on an increasingly broad range of topics—whether they're university planners discussing present and future construction, tech experts talking about blogging and starting a wiki, or a scholar lecturing on stem cell research.
Marcus retires as the IT Services account manager for the central administration offices of Student Affairs, Undergraduate Education, the Controller's Office and the Office of Development. In the interim, Jo-Ann Cuevas, a campus readiness specialist for IT Services, will serve as the facilitator for TIPS.
Marcus said Cuevas also identifies strongly with everyday staffers and will be a good advocate for them. "That's what Stanford's about," Marcus said. "We have the unsung heroes and heroines, the rank-and-file administrators who really get the work done and allow the scholars to have a place where they can do their work."