Employees Celebrate a 42-year Career in OIT

Ginny Cake, second from left, poses with colleagues Shellene Walker, Isabel Taylor and Jen Vizas. Photo by Jeannine Sato.

Colleagues and friends recently celebrated the career of Ginny Cake, Duke’s assistant chief information officer, at a retirement party at the Washington Duke Inn. Cake, who helped establish Duke’s modern technology infrastructure, including the OIT service desk, is retiring from Duke after 42 years.

Arriving at Duke in 1974 after earning a degree at Lees-McRae College, Cake started as an administrative assistant. In her first years, she said she didn’t have clear career plans, but worked her way up to a leadership position in the Office of Information Technology (OIT) by taking every opportunity available to her at Duke, from printing Duke’s original campus phone book using an IBM punch card computer, to creating an iPod distribution program for all incoming freshmen in 2004.

“I believe most of my success is due to building strong working relationships and always focusing on what is best for Duke,” Cake said. “Not for me or OIT, for Duke.”

Duke’s first director of OIT, Betty Leydon, worked with Cake from 1994 to 2001, before Leydon went on to lead Princeton’s technology department. At the retirement celebration, Leydon reminisced about Cake’s pivotal work, which still impacts Duke community members today. In the 1990s, Cake helped establish a technology service desk to assist with IT issues and she oversaw the launch of Students With Access to Technology (SWAT) to help incoming students with computer set-up, just as Duke’s network and the internet use were rapidly increasing. 

“We made it almost like a party, because Ginny has so much enthusiasm, she kept it fun.” said Leydon, referring to the SWAT computer set-up stations on move-in day. “I think she’s had the most impact of anyone in the whole IT organization.”

Former assistant vice president of OIT, Billy Herndon, who retired from Duke last year, laughed while remembering a brainstorming session he had with Cake and Leydon where sticky notes on a white board rose to more than seven feet high – until the three could no longer reach the top.

Tracy Futhey, Duke’s current chief information officer, summed up Cake’s 42-year career: “The thing that made Ginny so great, was the fact that she knew everyone and everything on campus,” Futhey said. “She left an imprint on us all.”