Matt Parlow, a Yale-educated lawyer from humble family origins, is set to take the top job at Chapman University, a school that mirrors his own trajectory of steady growth and ambition.
Parlow, Chapman’s executive vice president, works down the hall from current president Daniele Struppa. In September, he’ll take over Struppa’s presidential suite and helm the private university in Orange with more than 10,000 enrolled students and an endowment of more than $804 million. He was revealed Tuesday, Dec. 10, as the pick to be the school’s 14th president.
Struppa announced in May he will retire in late 2025. Since 2016, he’s shepherded the university from a teaching college with a modest research arm into a nationally ranked research institution.
Chapman University has 11 schools and colleges, including one of the nation’s top film schools and health, law and business programs ranked higher now than ever before. The university’s endowment has more than quadrupled in the last dozen years.
Parlow says his administration will strive to keep Chapman on its path by further bolstering the university’s academic reputation while enhancing its workforce development programs and expanding its footprint across Orange County. He’ll also focus on building the school’s endowment, he said, to make Chapman less tuition-dependent and more able to expand opportunities for students from all socioeconomic backgrounds.
While Chapman’s sticker price remains one of the highest among American universities, it has also become a more diverse institution and, subtly, a more affordable one. Twenty percent of Chapman undergrads are first-generation college students. Nearly half of the student body identifies as a student of color. And, students receive, on average, more than $30,000 in need-based financial aid.
“Over the last 30 years, we’ve transformed from a small college of less than 2,000 students into a mid-sized comprehensive private university,” Parlow said. “It’s unbelievable, the transformation.”
“As we’ve grown, we’ve also grown in excellence,” he added. “I want to continue Chapman on that exciting trajectory.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean Chapman’s student body will continue to grow exponentially, Parlow clarified. The university has agreed with the city of Orange to cap its enrollment at the main campus at around 10,500 students.
But that looming number may not be as big of a limiting factor as it may seem, Parlow suggested, because Chapman has plans to grow enrollment outside of Orange. Parlow said he will focus on developing professional programs at the university’s Graduate Health Sciences Campus in Irvine.
“We have more space down there that is ours, and I think there is the opportunity for growth, particularly if you look at where the healthcare needs of Orange County are,” he said.
The Irvine campus already hosts Chapman’s School of Pharmacy, a physician’s assistant program and a doctorate program in physical therapy. It could soon be home to more, and bigger, opportunities.
“We hear from our employer partners, particularly the major healthcare providers in Orange County, they want to partner with us to help build a pipeline of professional and workforce development from our programs into the healthcare field,” Parlow said.
Chapman University’s reputational growth over the years, like the size of its student body, is measurable.
In the past two decades, Chapman has seen a 9,000% increase in citations of its professors’ research, Provost Norma Bouchard boasted at commencement in May.
Parlow said the emphasis on research will not detract from the undergraduate experience. Rather, it should improve the school’s well-roundedness.
“I think at the core of Chapman University is personalized education,” he said. “We have deliberately small student-to-faculty ratios. The faculty we recruit here are amazing scholars, but they came here because they want to be in the classroom. They want to be doing research in the labs. They want to be doing creative projects with students.”
“At a lot of universities, faculty do their research and someone else teaches,” Parlow added. “That’s not who we are. Our faculty get to know our students. Our students get to have mentors.”
Parlow, 49, grew up around Los Angeles in a modest family.
While he bleeds Chapman Red now, before, he bled Dodger Blue. Parlow grew up listening to Vin Scully’s radio broadcasts every single summer night except on those few occasions he was lucky enough to sit in the bleachers.
Money was hard to come by in his household, Parlow said. Still, his dad made it a point to send him and his brother to a couple of Dodgers games a year. To pay for the nosebleed seats, his dad would go antiquing to find deals on knick-knacks that he could turn around at flea markets for a buck or two in profit. His dad would then use that small chunk of change to buy Dodgers tickets for the boys.
That pastime, antiquing, is actually how Parlow first came to know of Orange.
In 2005, Parlow began teaching law at Chapman University. After a few years of that, he spent eight years teaching and administrating at Marquette University in Milwaukee. He returned to Chapman in 2016 to serve as dean of the Dale E. Flower School of Law.
Parlow led the law school through a reputational crisis after former dean and then-faculty member John Eastman amassed criminal indictments in multiple states over allegations he helped orchestrate President Donald Trump’s effort to remain in office after the 2020 election.
Parlow said he moved the school forward by refusing to let unsavory national media attention derail the school’s student-centric strategic plan.
“The class we recruited that fall was the most diverse class in our law school’s history and had the strongest incoming credentials in terms of LSAT and GPA we ever had at that time,” Parlow said. “We reached a record high for employment numbers, as well, and we had a great fundraising year.”
Any private university president worth their salt must be a top-notch fundraiser. In his various roles at Chapman, Parlow has proven to be just that.
As the university’s executive vice president and chief advancement officer, Parlow has overseen Chapman’s largest fundraising campaign in university history, which has raised $400 million to date.
This past fiscal year, Chapman raised nearly $60 million, including a $10 million donation from the Argyros family that expanded the George L. Argyros College of Business and Economics.
Parlow says his administration will aim to keep Chapman on course to meet its goal of sustaining a $2 billion endowment by 2038.
Earlier in his career, Parlow seemed to be on a path away from academia. After clerking for a judge on the federal circuit, he practiced law for several years as an associate at a prominent national firm.
Later, the sports law expert consulted on legal issues in that industry. At Marquette, he even co-taught a course on collective bargaining with former Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig.
Today, his office is adorned with sports memorabilia. Mostly Dodgers stuff, of course. But also some Lakers items.
Yet, for all his love of sports, Parlow was consistently drawn to academia for his love of the work, which he describes as challenging.
“I love institution building,” he said. “As a young faculty member, I used to sit in the office of the associate dean and just pick his brain about all the different aspects of how the law school ran and why decisions were made and all the different pushes and pulls of different decisions and everything that goes on. And, I realized I was drawn to it.”
He describes his leadership style as a balance between a care for coworkers and a taste for numbers.
“I really care about my colleagues,” he said. “I care about creating an ecosystem where my colleagues, students, and all of those who invest their time, energy and philanthropic resources into this community can thrive. For me, that is very professionally fulfilling.”
But he’s not all touch-and-feel.
“I love data,” he added.
For instance, when Chapman Law grads were failing to pass the bar exam at concerning rates, Parlow used data to find out why that might be. He worked with faculty to pinpoint where, in their law school journeys, Chapman students needed more attention and how the school could milk the best results from investments into bar exam prep courses.
At first, his program overhaul didn’t succeed. Chapman Law alumni, albeit briefly, started to perform worse on their bar exams than before Parlow took over. But Parlow stuck with the program. He described this inflection as the biggest challenge of his career.
Then, the results kicked in. By the time Parlow moved on from dean in 2021, Chapman Law’s bar passage rate had risen more than 20 percentage points.
“Data doesn’t tell you the decisions to make, but it helps you make well-informed decisions,” Parlow said. “How do we make sense of data to create a personalized approach to help lead students to success?”
That’s one of many questions the incoming president will have to answer from behind his new desk this September. No longer the junior faculty member, he is now the one on campus to whom others will turn for answers.
Parlow says he’s up for the job.
“I think that my understanding of Chapman, my connections with Chapman and my connections with the community — all that experience at the law school — I think it all was a nice fit for where we are and where we’re going.”
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