Professor has taught 10,000 students at UC San Diego

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Charlie Perrin’s hand dances on the chalkboard, quick and tight. He’s thinking of a molecule, which comes to life as a small, spare symbol. For a second or two, he stands there enjoying the beauty of it.

“My students sometimes say I should do a podcast,” said Perrin, a professor of chemistry at the University of California San Diego. “I prefer the chalkboard.”

He’s old-school, but not in the way you may think. At 74, Perrin still gets so revved up about chemistry that he tends to fly through PowerPoint presentations. So he mostly sticks to the chalkboard, where he has to write things out. It forces him to pace himself. And he’s in it for the long run.

Lost in the headlines about UC San Diego’s research is a number: 10,000. That’s roughly how many students Perrin has taught at the university. He’s now in his 50th year on campus, a milestone reached by few professors in the University of California system. Many of his contemporaries retired long ago. The idea doesn’t appeal to Perrin. On a recent morning, while reflecting on a half-century in the classroom, he shrugged and said, “What would I do?”

The flip side of the question is: What would UC San Diego do without him? There aren’t many professors in the UC system who have his level of experience teaching organic chemistry, which is widely considered to be one of the hardest courses on campus.

In a nutshell, “o-chem” is the study of carbon, which is essential to all living organisms. Modern health science couldn’t exist without this field. Many students find it maddening. Those who don’t fare well in the course have little chance of getting in to a good medical school.

Anxiety about this benchmark is especially high at places like UC San Diego, where pre-med is a top major.

“A lot of my colleagues scorn the pre-meds,” said Perrin, who wears a coat and tie on a campus that isn’t known for either. “They figure (the students) are just grade-grubbers. I respect them. I’m hoping that the good students will become physicians.”

Don’t interpret that as softness. Perrin’s course — especially his exams — are known to be exacting and tough. He’s not an easy grader.

“I can’t give grades to people who don’t earn them,” Perrin said. “I worry about a student going on to medical school who is not qualified.”

Yasmin Aghajan, a pre-med student who took Perrin’s course, appreciates his clear-eyed approach.

“Students do get stressed out taking organic chemistry, but it’s important not to lose sight of the big picture,” Aghajan said. “After all, you’re pre-med because you want to be one, right? Medical school will be tough, so it’s good to get a feel for what a hard course will be like (before you get there).”

Perrin’s love of chemistry began when he was a child growing up in Pittsburgh, which he remembers as “a place where the steel mills belched soot. My mother couldn’t put laundry out to dry. It would just get black.”

He saw chemistry as wondrous, and he had a gift for it. It got him into Harvard University, where he was allowed to skip freshmen chemistry because he simply didn’t need to take it. The year was 1955, and chemistry was still largely a descriptive subject.

“You were told that these were the chemical reactions that occur. There was a lot of memorization,” Perrin said. “It is a lot different today. Now, we understand the principles of reactivity.”

He learned the basics of scientific research — and a lot about what it means to be a good teacher. Part of that insight came from a chemistry professor who Perrin said “was not very inspiring. I went to him and, as tactfully as I could, said that his course was not as clear as the physics course I was taking. He said the reason was that the electricity and magnetism I was studying in physics were well understood, but what he was saying in chemistry was not. It involved observation, interpretation. That was a revelation — that there were still things to be understood, and you needed to be honest about it with students. Honesty is important.”

The physics course he referred to was taught by E.M. Purcell, winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize in physics. Perrin said that class “was elegant and clear. To teach well, you need to be clear.”

Perrin ended up earning his doctorate at Harvard in 1963, doing work that caught the attention of recruiters at UC San Diego, which was beginning to take shape under giants. Nobel laureate Harold Urey had joined the faculty. So had renowned chemist Joe Mayer and his wife, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who would win the Nobel in physics that same year.

“They all had secure positions elsewhere and were willing to come here and create a new university, and I could become part of that,” Perrin remembered.

He accepted the job offer and went on to help with the task of writing the university’s chemistry curriculum. He’s been in the classroom and the lab at UC San Diego ever since.

“Charlie is a living legend,” said Ted Molinksi, a fellow chemistry professor at the university. “I’ve been at UC in one capacity or another for over 25 years, but it seems like a moment in time next to professor Perrin’s tenure. If personalities were like physical constants, Charlie’s would be gravity: ageless, unwavering and dependable.”

Perrin also gets good marks from students, partly because he does something that’s relatively uncommon: He allows them to bring detailed notes to class during major exams.

“They’re not cheat sheets, they’re reminder sheets,” said Perrin, whose short and wispy gray hair, full mustache and arching nose make him resemble Albert Einstein. “I have an ulterior motive: I want to encourage students to organize information, to learn what’s important. The sheets aren’t actually that much help during the exam. But it helps that they wrote things down. It helps them to learn.”

Pre-med student Cindy Yang said, “I am extremely glad that I took him for (introductory organic chemistry). He has given me such a strong foundation for approaching problems. I don’t think I would have the same fondness for organic chemistry if it weren’t for him.”

Privately and publicly, that’s what Perrin hopes for: “Chemistry gives you new ideas, it lets you solve problems, it gives you the power of understanding. It is beautiful.”

U-T intern Ayan Kusari contributed to this report.