Having been raised in Southern California, I escaped to the Midwest for college attending Northwestern University. I received a BA in Anthropology (??, yes, that is what my very business-oriented father used to say, but he said it with a different emphasis) in 1965 at which time I decided to get my military obligation behind me. The US Army gave me lots of training and then a one-year, all-expenses-paid vacation in Southeast Asia - mountains, beaches, jungles, you get the picture. At the end of this character-building experience I went back to school and spent two years making my father happy (finally) by getting an MBA from the Stanford Business School.

I started working for Stanford in 1970 as a financial analyst in the Controller's Office and spent the next 24 years in a variety of positions in the business, finance, administrative parts of the University. During this time I worked extensively with the information systems of Stanford developing, maintaining and using most of the University's major administrative systems. John Sack, Sandy Laws and I have worked together on many of these systems and systems initiatives for more than 20 years. In 1995 I took an early retirement option (the "rule of 75" was met) and left Stanford.

This led me to a small start-up software consulting firm, Context Integration, where I was the manager of Application Development. I was employee number 18 and by the time I left Context, at the end of 1997, they had grown to 180 employees in 6 cities nationwide. Context's business spans traditional client-server application development, database support services, web application development and education. During my tenure there, we grew in excess of 125% per year and remained profitable at all times.

At the end of 1997, I was drawn back into the university environment by John and Sandy and joined HighWire Press at the beginning of 1998. I do have a job description, but essentially my job will be to help the whole HighWire team continue the delivery of quality journals and system features to our publisher-partners.

send email to witscher@stanford.edu