The College Fix

He shuns podcasts for the chalkboard. He wears a suit to a campus known for T-Shirts and flip flops. And you can forget about grade inflation  – he’s got his red pen and he’s not afraid to use it.

Charlie Perrin, a Harvard alum who knew chemistry so well he skipped it his freshman year there, recently marked a half-century as a professor at UC San Diego, a rare feat.

Even rarer is Perrin’s style: he’s old school, but in a good way. The UT San Diego on Monday featured the educator, noting:

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

Click here to read more.

CLICK HERE to Like The College Fix on Facebook.