Charles Bauer, professor of computer science, has announced his retirement from Illinois Tech after 55 years of service.

Bauer has been a part of the Department of Computer Science since 1962. In the late 60s, he led a non-credit Saturday High School program at Illinois Tech to advance computer education for high school students and their teachers. Ultimately, 15,000 high school students and 1,200 teachers studied under this program. In 1970, he designed and created all the courses for the M.S. for Teachers in Information Science program. Throughout his time at Illinois Tech, Bauer has taught thousands of undergraduates. For more than 25 years he taught the Introduction to Programming courses and up until this past semester, he taught Computers in Society, a class aimed to help upperclassman realize the responsibility they have to society as a software engineer. Before joining Illinois Tech, Bauer worked at Lane Tech and wrote self-instruction texts for the IITRAN language, and then later, for a number of other programming languages. These books enabled college-level and high school-level students to learn to program without taking formal computer science courses. He is a longtime Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Mensa member.

Bauer and his wife Judith have four children, all of whom are Illinois Tech alumni: Mark Bauer (ME ’79, MAS ’80), Paula Monfroy (CHEM ’83, MS ’84), Peter Bauer (ME ’85, MAS ’89), and Matthew Bauer (MATH ’86, MS ’87; senior lecturer of Computer Science; director of Undergraduate Academic Advising, Illinois Tech).

The Department of Computer Science will be hosting a luncheon honoring Bauer’s service at Illinois Tech on Wednesday, April 12 at noon in Hermann Hall Ballroom. All are welcome. RSVP to Ann McBroom at mcbroom@iit.edu by Tuesday, April 4. To wish him well by email, he can be reached at bauerc@iit.edu.