Interview: Richard “Rick” Matasar

Ryan Rivet rrivet@tulane.edu
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Rick Matasar is the new senior vice president for strategic initiatives and institutional effectiveness at Tulane. Most recently, he served as vice president for university enterprise initiatives and professor of management at New York University. (Alumnus Adam Matasar is his son.)

What will you do as senior vice president for strategic initiatives and institutional effectiveness?

“How can you beat having a professional and personal life together in one great location?”

Rick Matasar
My assignment is to work with the president, the provost and the deans to develop new programming for Tulane, think of ways of marketing old things that we’re doing, and rethink the way we’re delivering services so we can be more effective and expand what we’re able to do as a university.

WATCH: Rick Matasar discusses his new role, higher education and his love of New Orleans.

Why did you decide to take the job at Tulane?
Jobs find you, you don’t find jobs. I’ve known President Mike Fitts for a long time, and we’ve been sharing conversations for 20 years about the state of higher education. As he took on this position at Tulane, we were speaking about what we could do in our roles at our respective institutions, and through a lot of conversation it became very clear that it would be much more fun to do them together than at separate places. So having President Fitts here and sharing in his vision for the university is exciting. On a personal level, I love the city and I have kids that live here, so how can you beat having a professional and personal life together in one great location?

What are the realities for a private university in the digital age?
The question of the effect of the digital age on higher education is actually almost a false question. There has always been some new technology. And the truth is, they’re all about the same thing: how we capture knowledge, how we transmit knowledge and how we share knowledge. ...

To read the entire interview, click here. This story originally appeared in the December 2015 issue of Tulane magazine.