University Environment Stanford University IT Environment University Environment Stanford's mission to provide teaching, research and community service is carried out with the leadership of 1,595 tenure-line faculty, supported by 8,000 staff serving 6,600 undergraduate and 7,500 graduate students. Stanford provides housing for 6,000 undergraduate and 3,500 graduate students on campus and supports a rich variety of programs and events. The extended Stanford community also includes over 250,000 alumni and each quarter thousands of distance education students and continuing education students. Other than necessary enterprise infrastructure such as wide area networking, researchers provide for their own information technology needs. There are hundreds of faculty-managed Unix servers including large installations such as the Human Genome Database.
Corporations often donate computing equipment to faculty.
This results in a variety of equipment supported in idiosyncratic fashion by departmental research groups. This also leads to security issues as systems administrators are often inexperienced and focused on research results rather than system administration. Technical support for teaching and learning, particularly administration of undergraduate education, is more centrally supported. Classroom assignment, student registration, course registration, housing assignments and many other services are supported by the Vice Provost for Student Affairs. Two recent developments are the funding of the Wallenberg Global Learning Center and creation of a Vice-Provost position to oversea Learning Technology and Extended Education.