Thomas A. Slobko, chief information officer and professor of mathematics emeritus at Occidental, died September 17 at Mt. San Antonio Gardens in Pomona. He was 85.
A native of Oak Creek, Colorado, Tom studied physics at Caltech for three years and received his B.A. (1964), M.A. (1966), and Ph.D. (1968) in mathematics from UCLA. In between studies, he worked for IBM (1961-62) and interned at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (summer 1966). Prior to joining the Occidental faculty in 1971, he was assistant professor of mathematics at Louisiana State University for three years. He retired from Oxy in 2006 after nearly 35 years at the College.
Tom was a member of the Mathematics Department throughout his time at Oxy, and served as associate dean of faculty from 1977-79, but his interests gravitated toward computer science. He was instrumental in ushering the College into the Information Age. When Tom took charge of Occidental’s Data Processing Department as a “temporary” director in summer 1979, one of his first acts was to change its name from “Data Processing” to “Computer Center.” (He later oversaw the establishment of a formal Help Desk and the department’s eventual designation as Information Technology Services.)
Under Tom’s watch, Oxy moved from typewriters to mainframes to modern laptops and desktops. Occidental got on the internet in October 1989, and the wires that were run during his tenure to connect Oxy’s buildings to each other and to the internet at large remain in place today. By 1997, every residence hall room had a data port, and that same year Occidental ranked 97th on Yahoo! Internet Life’s list of “America’s Most Wired Colleges.”
Longtime colleagues in ITS have fond memories of Tom’s home-baked holiday loaves, as well as the “Slobko Multiplier,” which was an unfailing predictor of how long a given technology project might really take. When Tom broke the news that he was retiring, mathematics factored into his decision. As colleague Steven Gilman ’01 recalls, “He wore dress shirts every day and years previously had calculated how long they lasted and how many he needed to have in order to reach his planned retirement age. As a math professor, he had already run the numbers on the shirts, the data was saying it was time to go, and the data is what mattered. What else was he going to do—buy more shirts?”
Tom is survived by his son, Michael. There are no plans for a memorial service. The Occidental flag flew at half-staff on September 26 in Tom’s memory.
Above photo: Tom Slobko, photographed in 1984 by Frances Hill.
