Versatility brings UCCS a new College of Business dean
Thomas Aicher seemed destined to work in both academia and athletics.
His father was a professor and a football coach for much of his career — leading his son to become a faculty member and eventually dean of the University of Colorado Colorado Springs College of Business.
Aicher, 45, will become permanent dean in August after serving eight months in an interim role. He was selected over two candidates who served as business school deans. He replaces Karen Markel, who returned to a faculty post after 2½ years as dean.
Aicher had been a UCCS College of Business faculty member in sports management since 2018 and is the fourth dean of the college since Venkat Reddy became interim chancellor and then permanent chancellor in 2017.
Joseph Aicher, Thomas’ father, retired in 2006 after 36 years on the faculty of North Carolina Central University in Durham, N.C., where he served for 17 years as chair of the political science department and as a position coach for the school’s football team. The historically Black institution has an enrollment of more than 8,000 students.
“My dad lived in both the athletic and academic worlds and had great impact in both,” Aicher said. “I knew I would end up where I did. I was a four-sport athlete in high school: track, soccer, wrestling and baseball. I was a middle-distance runner and sprinter in track. I ran the 400- and 800-(meter) races, and now I run marathons (he has done nearly 40 and hopes to run one in every state). I was really a soccer player who likes to run.”
Aicher grew up in Durham and enrolled at Virginia Tech, because he wanted to work in sports, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in marketing management. He completed internships with the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce in Blacksburg, Va., and the Salem Avalanche, the Class A affiliate of the Colorado Rockies.
After he graduated from Virginia Tech, Aicher took a job with the Class AAA Durham Bulls, leasing the team’s stadium for corporate and alumni activities, career fairs, trade shows and other events during the offseason or when the team was on a road trip.
The team laid him off during the recession that followed the dot-com crash, and he joined First and 10 Marketing, an online advertising agency, and also worked with Sports Management Worldwide, a sports agency that represented athletes in the Arena Football League and NFL Europe.
Aicher wanted to work in intercollegiate athletics, so he enrolled in graduate school at Texas A&M University to get a master’s degree in kinesiology with an emphasis in sports management. After receiving his master’s, his goals changed. Instead of working in a college athletic department, he wanted to become a faculty member. That meant he needed to get a doctoral degree, so he enrolled in Texas A&M’s doctoral program in kinesiology.
“If I had gone anywhere else for graduate school, I probably would still be working in intercollegiate athletics. Part of the reason I wanted to work in that area was that I wanted to help people reach their career goals,” Aicher said.
“I took a class in research methods and looked at what the faculty mentors and sports mentors were doing, and I saw faculty was having a much greater impact on many more people," he said. "So, I decided to teach a sports finance class and I fell in love with the interactions and connections with students, and how I could help focus and shape their career goals and efforts."
After talking with his father, Aicher decided that becoming a faculty member made more sense than becoming an athletic administrator.
After completing his doctoral degree, Aicher met a friend at a bar, who had run a half marathon that day and encouraged Aicher to start running. Aicher agreed that if he could run 6 miles the next morning, he would help the friend train for an upcoming marathon. They ran the San Antonio Marathon in 2009, the first of 37 Aicher has completed.
Kyle Mueller, a project manager at healthcare company Baxter International who was in a running group with Aicher in Cincinnati, described him as a “motivational (running) partner and sounding board,” who was committed to helping both succeed through competition. The pair adopted the goal of running marathons in every state, often running two, and as many as four, marathons in nearby states on consecutive days to reduce the cost of reaching their goal.
“As my running evolved, my research evolved. I have done a lot of research on my people choose the (running) events they do,” Aicher said. “It started with looking at why the White Rock Marathon (now the BMW Marathon) draws 25,000 to 30,000 runners and the Big D Marathon draws 4,000 to 5,000. Both are run on the same course. One is in April and the other is in December. It turned out people would rather train in the fall than in the winter.”
As the program and university grew, Aicher saw class sizes expand, but his connection to students diminish. He always wanted to live in Colorado, so he applied for an opening at UCCS even though he would be leaving a tenured faculty position to start over on the tenure track. He also suspected that the culture of the University of Cincinnati had become one in which other faculty members were jealous if his research was published in a prestigious journal.
“It was a lifeline to come here," Aicher said. "I was able to reconnect with the reason I got into this in the first place — small class sizes, great community partnerships and a very welcoming and collegial atmosphere among the faculty. I saw through my father why he taught at a historically Black institution — you could see the impact you had on students. I saw some of that at Northern Illinois, didn’t see as much of that at Cincinnati but I see it everywhere here (at UCCS).”
Aicher got the UCCS position in 2018 and regained academic tenure in 2021. A year later, the associate dean of the College of Business left and Aicher was named as the replacement.
Seven months later, he was named interim dean of the college when Markel returned to a faculty position. He will drop the interim designation next month, heading a school with 42 faculty members, a variety of undergraduate and graduate degree programs and many certificate programs.
Doug Price, CEO of Visit Colorado Springs, has known Aicher since he arrived at UCCS five years ago as part of an effort by a previous interim dean to add tourism expertise in the business college’s sports management program.
“For a community that relies so heavily on tourism and outdoor recreation, there wasn’t a hospitality management program in Colorado Springs and that is something they (UCCS administrators) wanted to pursue,” Price said. “He has been very supportive of the tourism industry.”
Among the biggest challenges Aicher and many other academic leaders face is declining enrollment, triggered by a smaller generation of college students and worsened by the exponential proliferation of online learning options that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic.
He said colleges and universities also face challenges and opportunities in the growth of artificial intelligence tools that can help business become more productive but can also make academic cheating easier.
“Colleges and universities have gone through several evolutions in the last 15 to 20 years, including the rise of online learning. COVID made it a requirement to figure out what that looked like for our students and community, and we have to determine what makes the most sense going forward,” Aicher said. “We need to become the hub for workforce development, to help people have the skills and background to be success in their careers and have a well-educated work force to serve the community.”
That means the College of Business probably will focus less on degrees and more on what Aicher calls “stackable credentials” — showing what students have learned, whether or not they have completed a degree. That could include creating resumes and portfolios showing their expertise.
“This (stackable credentials) will give students flexibility in degree planning and will give them an off-ramp to show they accomplished something, through a certificate or other credentials, and tailor their own degree,” Aicher said.
The year before arriving at UCCS, Aicher met his future wife, Ally Hartzel, who was working at the University of Texas at Austin, during a conference in Denver. The relationship didn’t develop until two years later when he discovered at another conference that she was single, looking for a career change and willing to move. They dated until the pandemic started in early 2020, when he was in Austin and they decided to drive back together to Colorado Springs.
The couple married in 2020 in a ceremony at the Siamese Twins formation in Garden of the Gods. They now have two daughters — a 2-year-old and a newborn.
(Wayne Heilman, The Gazette)