The incomparable Bruce Maxim

The day I’m scheduled to talk with Bruce Maxim, the first of two conversations we’re to have about his four-decade-long career at UM-Dearborn, he’s about 15 minutes late. When he does log on to Zoom, he explains that he lost track of time; he was finishing a letter of recommendation for a student. He tells me he does about 30 or 40 of these a year, which, though no one keeps statistics on such things, sounds like a lot. In any case, it feels like a window into the status Maxim holds among his students that so many would put their faith in him for something requiring a personal touch. It perhaps also feels noteworthy because Maxim doesn’t come across as a particularly gushy person. His care vibe is more that of a straight-talking father or grandfather. A little soft around the edges, yes, but mostly someone you love and respect because he’ll always make time for you and you can count on him for useful, life-tested guidance. True to form, Maxim’s own explanation for why close relationships with students have become part of his yearly routine is concise and straightforward. “I think I just listen to them,” he says. “I had a student who came to me early in the semester because she was going to miss some time because she was getting married and was going on her honeymoon. And so a couple weeks later, I asked her how her trip was, and she just lit up and told me all about it. Honestly, I don’t always remember their names. I’m terrible with names. But I remember stuff about them and what’s important to them.”

Even leading his classes, Maxim says his primary mode of teaching these days is listening, though that reflects a personal evolution. He came of age in academia when lectures were pretty much exclusively how university professors handled themselves in front of students and so that’s how he did it for the first two decades of his career. But in-class lectures haven’t been his go-to for at least a decade. They’re almost as extinct as the final exam, which he did away with a number of years ago to make time for student presentations. He does generally ask students to do a before-class reading assignment and maybe watch an essentials-only recorded lecture that rarely exceeds 15 minutes. That leaves class time for groups projects, role-playing exercises, student presentations and feedback — what he still calls “active learning,” an antecedent of project- or practice-based learning, which, today, is one of the major cross-college education initiatives at UM-Dearborn. If it’s one of the early weeks in his popular game design course, for instance, students might present a paper prototype storyboard for their game so they can get feedback from the other students. If it’s his software engineering course, one group might pretend to be a client who needs a new software application, while another group role plays as the developer, the two engaging in a fact-finding back-and-forth that Maxim says any successful developer has to get good at. He says subjects for the projects are always of the students’ choosing, noting he has little interest in hearing 15 students present the same project over and over. Maxim, himself, usually spends class time just walking around the room, eavesdropping on students as they problem solve, “offering a pithy critique” as needed to help them push through an obstacle. To accommodate all the brainstorming, feedback and on-the-fly design, he used to carry eight 2-feet-by-4-feet white boards from his office to class and back. Now, he loves teaching in the new Engineering Lab Building classrooms, where students can literally write on the glass walls. The state-of-the-art architecture has finally caught up with his educational philosophy.

The trust he puts in students to direct their own learning is certainly part of what’s made Maxim one of the most beloved professors at UM-Dearborn. But his ability to connect with his students likely also has something to do with the fact that, had he been born 50 years later, he’d probably be just like a lot of them. At age 72, Maxim is still relatable. For example, he loves video games — he’s been playing them since the 1970s and still plays today, though much less and now he prefers games that don’t feel all-consuming. (He is, however, indulging his granddaughter's desire to teach him Minecraft.) With his interest in technology, it’s also hard not seeing a Gen Z Maxim find his way, as he did as a student in the 1970s, into the computer science field. Today, that’s a pretty straightforward path for students, but it was a lot different back then. He says when he enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in 1970, there were just two classes in computer science, which, at that time, was still seen as a branch of mathematics. It certainly wasn’t something you could major in. When I ask him how, then, he ended up in the field, he actually has to take a second to think about exactly how it all happened. 

Indeed, much of what ultimately led Maxim to a career in computer science is a mix of circumstance and curiosity. He figures it likely started when he took a position as a research assistant while he was doing his undergraduate work at U-M. Part of his job there was to do statistical analysis, which involved using the office’s computers. It’s worth noting that computers in the mid-1970s had a limited range of functions. Lacking any of today’s niceties, like graphical user interfaces, Maxim says computers were used almost exclusively for numerical computations that humans would only be able to do much more slowly. As a mathematics student, he found this early form of computing interesting and intuitive, and he soon made a habit of not only doing what he was told, but of figuring out new things the office could use the computers for. The work suited him, so he enrolled in one of the few computer science courses at U-M, a class in basic programming for mathematics graduate students that was taught by a friend of his.

More often, Maxim’s computer science education came from real-world experiences. During his time as a PhD student in mathematics education at U-M, he had a plethora of side jobs, which, because of the expertise he was building, increasingly involved computers. When he was working part-time as a teacher at Greenhills School in Ann Arbor, for example, he started  computer literacy and computer programming courses. Around the same time, he worked for a “brilliant statistician” in the U-M epidemiology department, where Maxim did analysis for a community health study and eventually worked the four other statisticians there out of a job because he was so productive. Later, when the dean of curriculum at the U-M Medical School needed someone to run the instructional computing course, Maxim not only took on that role, he expanded the curriculum to include a couple dozen workshops a year that helped doctors, nurses and staff use computers for everything from graphing to complex statistical analysis. 

Eventually, Maxim built up enough expertise where he thought about making computer science the focus of an academic career. His own PhD was in mathematics education, but he never enjoyed teaching math as much as he did computer science. In the early 1980s, he started teaching programming at Washtenaw Community College, while keeping an eye out for something more permanent. He applied for an opening at UM-Dearborn and got his foot in the door as a visiting adjunct assistant professor in the mathematics department. But, just like everywhere else he worked, Maxim made an impression that quickly led to more opportunity. “I started off teaching pre-calculus, which I took because I honestly wanted to see if I could still tolerate teaching introductory math,” Maxim remembers. “But then they had an opening for 150, the intro course in computer science, and they offered me that. Then the next semester they moved me up to 200, and then they had me teach two or three computer classes that summer.” Impressed, the department offered him a one-year visiting appointment in the fall. Maxim finally felt confident enough to quit all his side jobs.

The following year, a retirement led to an opening for a tenure track assistant professor position, which Maxim landed, and just a year after that, they made him assistant director of the computer and information science program. In those days, CIS was still such a new discipline, nobody knew quite what to do with it. Maxim says the program was initially housed in something called the Division for Interdisciplinary Studies, which no college really owned. But CIS quickly attracted so many students — about 500 majors by 1990 — that it became a little bit of a “bloodbath” fight over which college would get CIS when it was judged to need a permanent home. It ultimately landed within the College of Engineering in 1992, but the transition was messy. For example, Maxim had to resign his position in mathematics and then have faith that the engineering dean would reappointment him there. There was no department chair and very little funding. As Maxim recalls, money was so short he was instructed to “steal” his furniture and computer from his office in the mathematics department. He loaded the latter onto a dolly and wheeled it over to his new office himself.

In those early days, he says the curriculum was a work in progress too. When Maxim arrived in 1985, he recalls a lot of the courses were in need of an overhaul. But within five years, he and his colleagues had updated courses to the most recent curriculum recommendations and launched several new classes, many of which Maxim created. He launched the first course in artificial intelligence at UM-Dearborn in 1988. He created the first software engineering course in 1995, which seeded the development of the first accredited software engineering bachelor’s program in the state in 2002. (Maxim also co-authored what’s been the leading textbook in software engineering for three decades.) And, of course, many know Maxim as the architect of the game design program — one of the earliest in the country — which attracts students who want to build games, but also grad students in a variety of disciplines who see it as a way to improve their use of simulations.

Maxim powered a lot of innovation within CIS, but his untraditional credentials, born of a time when official computer science bonafides were more of a rarity, sometimes proved to be a professional stumbling block. “When we created the software engineering class, we taught it as a ‘topics’ class for two years,” Maxim explains. “And when we brought in a department chair, who was a software engineer, he said, ‘Bruce, why the hell isn’t this a regular class?’ And I explained to him that it was because the executive committee in engineering won’t let me teach it then — they think I’m unqualified.” (His department chair went to bat for him and he got to keep the class.) Twice, he used his sabbatical to audit classes at U-M so he’d have a record of coursework in areas he was already well-versed in. Perhaps his most surprising career statistic: It took him six attempts to secure his promotion to full professor. The final time, he almost gave up, until the new dean, Tony England, personally urged him to resubmit the application Maxim had decided to withdraw. Now, Maxim jokes that he at least makes more than the incoming assistant professors, “unless we’re hiring a superstar.”

Some of these professional roadblocks may also have been due to the fact that Maxim wasn’t particularly focused on workplace politics. Early on in his career, during the original battle over CIS, he sided with students on a volatile issue, which he’s pretty sure burned a bridge with the dean. Those who know Maxim know he’s not a combative person, but he is sort of a gadfly, both within his department and at the university. “It’s always been very hard for me to see a problem and not try to do something to fix it,” he says, describing his style of confrontation succinctly as “squeaky wheel.” In the early days, he says, that might have rubbed some people the wrong way. Now, you get the sense he’s respected for it — no doubt in part because Maxim has put in countless hours on dozens of committees, including Faculty Senate, trying to make things better. When he was honored with the most recent of several distinguished service awards he received from the university, he says they told him he’d “been on 110 committees and chaired 70 of them.” Maxim assumes they counted right, downplaying the achievement by saying if he chaired so many committees, that means other people were probably doing a lot of the work. 

Maxim has now been at UM-Dearborn for 41 years. That’s saying something for a guy who proclaims, with a hint of pride, a history of quitting jobs when he doesn't like the people he works for. Maybe he’s not always gotten his due, but if there is a chip on his shoulder about that, it doesn’t appear too heavy. Part of that is because teaching — and the relationships he has with his students — has always been the part of his job that brings him the most joy. He says when he does retire — probably in three years — it’s easy to pick out what he’ll miss the most. It’s the “whole teaching thing,” he says, especially the time after class when students are looking for guidance, not on the assignment he just gave them, but on something going on with their lives. Sometimes they’re looking for advice on “big, life changing stuff,” like whether to quit a job, or maybe even quit a relationship. Maxim isn’t one to dole out advice, not directly. “I can’t tell you what to do. I can only tell you what I would do,” he says. “Yeah, I quit three jobs because I couldn’t stand the people I was working for or the situation was ethically incompatible for me. But I can’t tell you if that’s the right thing for you — because I don’t know what your family obligations are or what your financial constraints are.”

What he will do, though, is make time for you. To share his own perspective, but probably mostly to listen and understand. And you can always count on Maxim to give it to you straight.

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Story by Lou Blouin