Staff secretary has lifelong ties to the university

Thomas Wolfe’s famous novel about American life, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” expresses a sentiment many people discover to be true.

Not so for Colleen McCabe. She has come home again, to UW–Madison, and she now occupies one of the top leadership positions among the largest contingent of university employees.

“They say you can never go home again,” says McCabe, who took over in July as secretary of the academic staff. “It’s not quite true.”

From her first days of life, McCabe’s life sojourn has included the university. She lived on campus the first five years of her life as her father, Robert McCabe, studied wildlife ecology under the famed environmentalist, Aldo Leopold.

She remembers cavorting with Leopold’s grandchildren at “the Shack,” the chicken coop-turned-cabin on the Sauk County farm that inspired the world-famous book, “A Sand County Almanac.”

“We went to picnics at ‘the Shack’ when I was little … but I was too young to remember Leopold himself,” she says.

With her upbringing, McCabe almost inevitably developed a strong bond with the university. Her family lived on campus at 217 N. Orchard St., which was torn down for the computer science building addition, and she honed her verbal skills at the university preschool. As she grew, she often accompanied her dad on his research expeditions in Picnic Point and the Arboretum.

One of her early vivid childhood memories was when a group of monkeys escaped from the university’s Primate Center. When one of them climbed a tree right outside the family’s kitchen window, her mother tried to entice it inside with a banana.

“It was quite exciting,” she says, a little-girl sparkle in her eyes.

Her father eventually joined as a faculty member and later chaired the university’s Department of Wildlife Ecology. The family moved into the new University Houses with other young faculty and their families as neighbors. McCabe, meanwhile, went on to graduate from West High School in 1962 and UW–Madison in 1966, earning a bachelor’s in political science.

At the time, the Vietnam War was heating up, and the National Security Agency hired McCabe as an analyst and linguist. She learned Vietnamese at the National Cryptologic School at Fort Meade, Md., and the government put her skills to use transcribing North Vietnamese communications intercepted by the U.S. military.

With intense pressure to correctly transcribe the tapes – which included the sound of machine gun fire and exploding bombs in the background – and her brother fighting in the conflict, “It was a high-stress job,” she says with a sigh.

“I wasn’t a protester, but some of this activity was difficult to deal with on a daily basis,” she says.

When her husband got reassigned to a Hawaii military post in 1969, she happily left the NSA. The couple returned to Madison in 1972.

The next several years brought the happy blur of babies and the full-time job of raising them for McCabe. She re-entered the out-of-home workforce in 1980 – and started to debunk Wolfe’s theory: UW-Extension hired her to teach a correspondence course in technical writing.

After a short stint as a technical writer with a private company, McCabe was hired by the Division of Informational Technology in 1984. She held a number of management positions in publishing and training until this summer, when she replaced Steve Myrah as secretary of the academic staff.

Several years of serving on academic staff committees whetted her appetite for the job, created in 1987 when academic staff were granted a formal role in helping administer the university.

The secretary of the academic staff coordinates the activities of the Academic Staff Assembly and its executive arm, the Academic Staff Executive Committee, and oversees academic staff elections. McCabe first applied for the job in 1992 when Myrah took over for Robert Miller, the first person to hold the position.

“I’m glad I didn’t get the job then,” she says. “I wasn’t quite ready for it.”

She’s ready now. As she has embraced the position, McCabe is helping with the effort to establish more Committees on Academic Staff Issues in schools, colleges and departments. The Academic Staff Assembly approved their creation in 1998. She is also taking advantage of technology, namely e-mail and the World Wide Web, to increase timely communication to all academic staff to involve them more in university governance.

Overall, she hopes to enhance the role academic staff play in running UW–Madison.

“It’s important that academic staff have a good rapport and are well-respected around the university,” she says. “I feel I can continue and further that tradition.”