UCI Management Dean Elected to Mercury S&L; Board

Dennis J. Aigner, dean of the UC Irvine Graduate School of Management, has been elected to the board of directors at Mercury Savings & Loan in Huntington Beach.

Since coming to UCI from USC in mid-August, Aigner has said he wanted to foster closer ties between the management school and the county’s business world.

“I see this as a very explicit way of putting into practice what I preach,” he said Thursday.

The S&L; is the first county company to tap Aigner for a board position. In October, he was elected to the board of the Industrial League of Orange County, made up of about 900 county companies, which addresses business issues.

The contacts he makes with local executives, Aigner said, should help the management school’s students earn spots as interns or permanent employees with the companies. And he expects to bring to the school top executives “to talk to students about the real world.”

Aigner said he has not solicited his new board positions. He said his public comments about wanting to get involved in the business community prompted the Industrial League to seek him out. And he got to know Mercury’s chairman, Leonard Shane, through Shane’s work as a member of the chancellor’s UCI Chief Executive Roundtable and the management school’s policy committee.

A professor of management and economics, Aigner, 51, was credited with vastly upgrading USC’s economics department as its head for 9 years before coming to UCI. He taught for 10 years at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and for 5 years at the University of Illinois before going to USC.

Besides electing Aigner to the board, Mercury’s directors also designated two longtime board members as directors emeritus, a semi-retirement position that carries all the rights and privileges of board members except the right to vote.

They are Dr. Masami Ogata, who had been on the board since Mercury opened its doors in 1964, and Sidney Title, who has been on the board for nearly 25 years.