Daniele Struppa has always insisted he’s a mathematician first. Even through nearly 10 years at the helm of Chapman University, he kept a whiteboard in his office crowded with equations.
Staying curious, he said, is what makes him feel most alive.
“I’m always wondering why stuff happens the way it happens. And the only way to answer the question is through research,” Struppa said. “You’re never bored. Never bored. There is never the same problem twice.”
On a recent morning inside the university’s presidential suite — now occupied by President-elect Matt Parlow — the Italian-born mathematician, whose last day as president is Sept. 1, let his eyes twinkle and his arms wave as he tried to explain why he’s taken up learning Arabic.
“My attraction for math is also due to the shape of the symbols, the way the symbols come together. I cannot explain this very well, but I think that there is some archetypical value of mathematics,” he said. “I’m interested in Arabic mathematics … and that’s why I’m studying Arabic, because a lot of this happens there. And so I’m very curious to see in their work, if one can find some answers.”
Struppa’s curiosity has always doubled as a compass, shaping his tenure in ways big and small, whether guiding Chapman through a once-in-a-century pandemic or pushing the university toward becoming a more research-driven institution.
“Everything he did evolved around that idea,” Jim Doti, Chapman’s president for 25 years before Struppa stepped in in 2016, said. “How can we move Chapman in that direction?”
A mathematician in the president’s chair
Struppa’s academic specialty is Fourier analysis, a field of mathematics that studies breaking complex signals or functions into simpler waves, like sines and cosines, to understand their underlying patterns. By his own admission, it’s “very hard,” but the difficulty is part of the beauty. For him, symbols and equations carry something almost dreamlike, “a glimpse into this universe” that kept him writing and teaching even as he ran a university.
He never quite left the research world behind.
“I still write two or three papers a year. I just finished a book this week,” he said.
Struppa, 70, concedes that choosing administration three decades ago came with tradeoffs.
“Yes, I do have some regrets. I mean, not huge, because life has treated me well and I kept my mathematics going. But could I have done much more if I’d stayed? Yes, I think so,” he said.
Andrew Jordan, hired in 2021 to co-direct the Institute for Quantum Studies but who has known Struppa for a decade, said the outgoing university leader is “a remarkable guy in that he not only does the president gig, but teaches classes and he does research, too, which I think is amazing.”
Under Struppa’s tenure, the university shed its image as a regional school, establishing itself as a nationally recognized research institution.
New buildings rose across campus, and Struppa shepherded the creation of major academic hubs from the Institute for Quantum Studies to the Dale E. and Sarah Ann Fowler School of Engineering, the Schmid College of Science and Technology to the School of Pharmacy in Irvine. Along the way, Chapman also saw steady gains in national rankings, both for the university as a whole and for several of its professional schools.
“All of those are directly Daniele’s vision,” said Justin Dressel, a co-program director of physics at Schmid College. “It’s hard to overstate just how much that’s radically transformed Chapman University’s trajectory.”
Struppa has also recruited world-class faculty, including Vernon L. Smith, a Nobel laureate in economics, and Yakir Aharonov, a National Medal of Science honoree in physics. Aharonov serves as the director of the Institute for Quantum Studies.
“It’s easy to think if you don’t know the ins and outs of the school, well, these professors just came from out of nowhere and suddenly they’re at Chapman. But I can tell you that they all came to Chapman in large part because of Daniele,” said Parker Kennedy, a Chapman trustee. “I’ve talked to some of the professors, not just at the institute, but throughout the campus. And I say, ‘How the heck did you end up at Chapman?’ Because they’re from all over the country and the world. And invariably they say, ‘Oh, I bumped into Daniele at a conference and I got to know him. And here I am.’”
Dressel, who came to Chapman in 2015 from the University of Rochester, said Struppa “understands what matters and has managed to emphasize that and also have frank discussions with other academics about what they need.”
If anything, Struppa found a strange symmetry between his two roles. Running a university required the same instincts as solving a theorem: define the problem, test the possibilities and accept that progress only comes through struggle.
And that’s why Struppa said he’s pushed so hard for Chapman to have a strong research program.
One key reason, he said, is that “when you are a researcher, you learn every day, and that keeps you humble.”
That experience, he said, helps him be more understanding and patient with students as they wrestle with challenging material.
“When a student doesn’t know how to multiply polynomials, they’re struggling in the same way in which I struggle when I try to understand the quantum physics problem,” he said. “So that to me is maybe the No. 1 most important reason why we need to have researchers in the classroom. They are kept humble and they understand challenge and difficulty and effort.”
That humility and approachability, Chapman junior Taylor Eskew said, extend far beyond the classroom.
Eskew, the Schmid College senator, said she first connected with Struppa at a scholarship dinner at Citrus City Grille in Old Towne Orange.
“It was obvious how rooted he is in the community. Everyone seemed to know him and love him, and that sense of approachability has always stood out to me,” she said.
For Eskew, the opportunities Struppa fostered have been transformative. Originally drawn to Chapman for swimming and astrophysics, she said the “entire trajectory of my life” changed when she discovered the university’s quantum studies initiatives.
“Quantum is not something that is seen in undergraduate work, like at all. It’s really mainly just a graduate-level study. And so I think it’s really unique that we are given that opportunity to be able to study that,” she said.
Doti said Struppa’s continued teaching gave him unique insight into the university’s academic life.
“One thing Daniele has been able to do that I wasn’t during the time I was president is he’s continued to teach,” he said. “I think that experience is necessary to give a president the insight to know what’s most important. What are the ingredients? What are the factors that lead to an exciting and dynamic experience in the classroom? What raises it to being something special? And you have to teach to see that.”
Decisions from the president’s chair
And then there was the time Struppa had to create an engaging and dynamic classroom experience, even when students couldn’t be physically present.
“We closed the university the day before spring break. That’s when the governor told California we need to go into lockdown,” he recalled. “I sent a message to the faculty saying, ‘The university is closing, but the classes continue.’ We had one week to move to an online system. That’s a huge demand.”
Struppa said he still remembers the eerie quiet of campus in the spring of 2020. The classrooms were empty and bottles of hand sanitizer stood guard at every threshold.
Chapman weathered the pandemic without layoffs, furloughs or cuts to salaries and benefits, Struppa said.
“I wouldn’t say that it was as if nothing had happened, because that’s not true, but certainly we didn’t miss a beat. So I’m very proud,” he said.
“Often people ask me, and I say this is the time when I was really able to show leadership,” he added. “Most of the time, you just do what you’ve got to do. But that time, it was really more complex.”
But his leadership has been questioned at times. Support from conservative billionaire Charles Koch’s foundation for what became Chapman’s Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy drew heavy criticism in 2018, with some faculty accusing the university of importing politics into the classroom.
Struppa still defends the decision as one of his proudest.
“It was a beautiful idea,” he said of the Smith Institute’s flagship program, an undergraduate minor in “humanomics” that blends literature, history, philosophy and economics. “I was very proud that I stood up to the pressure because that’s when you see whether a president should be a president or go home and do something else.
“This was an issue of academic freedom,” he said, “you had colleagues who had an intellectual vision and they find a way to support it and just because the support comes from an entity that you may disagree with, there should not be an obstacle.”
Kennedy said where Struppa showed special leadership was his consistency in dealing with students and faculty, particularly in the area of free expression.
“He really believes in free speech. So he’s predictable,” Kennedy said.
Some faculty said Chapman was too slow to sever ties with John Eastman, the law professor who was indicted for his role in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Eastman had already stirred campus outrage with previous stances, including his argument that Vice President Kamala Harris was ineligible for office because her parents weren’t U.S. citizens.
Struppa pushed back hard on the narrative that Chapman was condoning Eastman’s actions. Eastman announced he was leaving the university on Jan. 13, a week after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“It’s interesting that people think we moved slowly,” he said. “It is an indication for me that those who claim we were too slow are just in bad faith.
“I’ll be very clear about this: A university that acts in five days or six is remarkable,” he said of the process required.
“So it wasn’t pleasant, but the university and John separated from each other,” he added, “and I’m happy the way this happened.”
More recently, pro-Palestine students set up a campus encampment to push for the university to divest from Israel. Again, Struppa says he chose to protect free speech, even as he denied their demands.
“There is no way a democratic society can advance unless we allow people to say stuff that really bothers us. Free speech is designed exactly to protect the speech that you find hideous,” he said. “My refusal to criticize openly John Eastman is paralleled by my refusal to clamp down on the encampments. Because free speech is more important. It’s more important than what I think about John’s statement. It’s more important than what I think about the statement of our students.”
The encampment ended without arrests or violence, a point Struppa counts as another success.
Struppa has also been pressed on Chapman’s struggles with diversity, especially for Black students and in the last school year for structural changes to its DEI office. In 2021, he publicly said that the university had “a problem we need to address” with how it was supporting Black students and Black students’ lower graduation rate. Three years later, he emphasizes Chapman’s gains with Latino enrollment, and frames Black student numbers as partly a matter of geography and “pipeline.”
“Well, I think that we are growing significantly in our number of Hispanic students, and that is a very natural reflection of where we are. So I think that we’re becoming more representative of the community where we live,” he said. “We don’t have that many Black people living in Orange County. So the numbers that are low, if you look at them in an abstract way, are actually not too surprising.”
He argues the university has created a welcoming environment, but acknowledges, “it’s a challenge, but part of the challenge is the pipeline … and the location.”
Parlow noted Chapman’s founding commitment to access.
“We were founded on the inauguration day of Abraham Lincoln. And the point of our founders was access. Access to education for groups who otherwise couldn’t go to higher ed because of restrictions that were placed on people based on race and gender,” he said. “Those have always been our values of a place of access and so even before we had an office of DEI, this was our mission. It was our mission while we had it, and then now that we no longer have it, it continues to still be part of our mission and what we do.”
What’s next?
If there’s a personal through-line for Struppa, it’s the pull of questions that still bug him.
He lights up describing a current problem in quantum physics about functions that “oscillate much faster than what we think they should do” and how that relates to analytic functions.
It’s the kind of puzzle he’s eager to return to.
“The question we’ve been pursuing for the last five or six years is to figure out what is the exact relationship between these two properties. And we’ve written four or five papers, but we don’t have yet the final answer. And I suspect it’s going to take a few more years to do that,” he said.
He and his wife, Dr. Lisa Sparks, the Foster and Mary McGaw Endowed Professor in Behavioral Sciences, are also turning their attention back to the mountains. Both avid climbers, Struppa proposed to Sparks on Cotopaxi, an active volcano in South America.
“We’re going to do as much as we can of that, as much as our physical body will allow us to do,” Sparks said. “Now we’re going to have a more flexible schedule to do those things that really are part of who we are.”
Struppa hopes to return to Cho Oyu — at 26,864 feet, it’s the world’s sixth-highest peak on the Nepal-Tibet border just west of Everest — once his knee is healed. Sparks said she hopes they can tackle the Camino de Santiago in Spain and spend more time in Italy and Colorado, indulging in hiking, climbing, skiing and the kind of nature that grounds them.
Will he miss the presidency?
“I don’t think so,” Struppa said matter-of-factly.