The University of Arizona Alumnus
Fall 2007
Fit to Perfection by Margaret Regan
When Christopher J. Vlahos, new president and executive director of the UA Alumni Association, flew out to Tucson to interview for the job, he was stunned by the dryness of the desert below.
“It’s a shock when you fly over the Southwest,” says Vlahos, an Ohian born and bred. “You see brown, not green. But there aren’t mountains in Ohio. And the mountains here are spectacular.”
Vlahos started his new job July 16, and he didn’t even mind his first desert summer.
“There’s relatively little humidity here,” he enthuses. “A 100-degree day here is like 85 in Ohio.”
And if he likes the weather and the mountains, he’s delighted with the university. On move-in day in August, when he helped this year’s crop of freshmen lug their laptops and luggage into the dorms, he met students from as far away as Maine, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
“This is a great school academically,” he says. “I asked the students why they had come here. Their first response was the academics — engineering, business, dance.”
Another good omen: UA President Robert Shelton extended the job offer the day Vlahos and his wife, Beth, were celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary. College sweethearts (he was Phi Kappa Psi and she was Chi Omega), the Vlahoses now have three sons, Phil, 20, Kevin, 18, and Kurt, 15.
For now, Vlahos is a temporary bachelor, camping out in an apartment in Tucson while Beth shepherds Kevin through his senior year of high school back in Columbus. Come next fall, the family will join Vlahos in the Old Pueblo. Kevin already has taken the UA tour, and his dad has high hopes he’ll enroll as a Wildcat.
Before coming to the UA, Vlahos worked for six years at the alumni association of his alma mater, Ohio State University, as vice president of membership and marketing. Before that, he spent two decades in advertising, Vlahos relished the switch to the university environment.
“Instead of working for various clients for whom I had no emotional connection … at Ohio State I could work every day on behalf of my alma mater.”
Now 49, Vlahos says he was ready to move up to the challenge of becoming president of an alumni association. Ohio State’s Alumni Association head, Archie Griffin, a two-time Heisman winner, wasn’t going anywhere, so with Griffin’s blessing, Vlahos decided to move on.
“I was picky,” he says. “Ohio State offered a big school, a big alumni association. That’s what I was looking for. The UA has the same attributes.”
Even better, when he came to interview with President Shelton, he found that the “whole UA leadership team is new — the president, the (acting) provost, the president of the UA Foundation. This was the right job at the right time.”
Vlahos grew up in Columbus, the grandson of Greek immigrants on his father’s side, and Polish immigrants on his mother’s. The oldest of four children, Vlahos went to his father’s alma mater to earn a degree in journalism. (He earned his master’s degree in public affairs there this past June.)
“I was a very involved student,” he says. “I was a member of Sphinx, a honorary like the Bobcats (at the UA.) A university is a very special place to me. It’s where you grow up, where you’ve chosen your career, maybe met your spouse. It’s an incredible four years of transformation.”
After graduation, Vlahos moved to New York to work for Advertising Age magazine. But with the advent of cable TV, the advertising industry was exploding, and Vlahos itched to join the front lines. He returned to the Midwest, and worked his way up through a series of ad agencies, in Columbus, Cleveland, St. Louis. He loved working “the media side,” serving as a link between the creative and finance departments. He met with clients, evaluated their needs and budget, and advised them on the best advertising strategy.
“It was a Renaissance position, working with lots of other areas.”
Through it all, Vlahos remained a loyal Buckeye. He joined an alumni club in the Big Apple and started a young alumni club in Cleveland. Back in Columbus, he served on numerous alumni committees, and when the job opened up at the alumni association, he jumped.
Now Vlahos is eager to bring his years of professional expertise to bear at the UA.
“Alumni are critically important to the university,” he says. “Public universities are becoming more private, in terms of raising money.”
“The Alumni Association is a counterpoint to the Foundation. They raise funds. Our job is to keep alumni engaged with the UA in other ways.”
Vlahos has plenty of ideas of how alumni can help.
“We can invite alumni to recruit students, to serve as mentors to students. Students who graduate need employment, they need internships. We have 240,000 alumni with the potential to serve as career resources.”
Before Vlahos came on board, the association asked alumni to pay an annual fee to keep up their membership. About 7,000 have signed on so far. Graduates who joined before the 1980s paid to become “life members” and some have balked at paying the new annual fee.
“We’re rethinking that,” Vlahos says. “The life members are valuable assets. But I hope they understand the fee is essential to our operation. We need revenue to provide essential programs for students.”
The fee money goes to various enterprises. It helps support alumni clubs around the country, which in turn raise money for student scholarships. It helps foot the bill for Homecoming, and for the Alumnus magazine, which gives alumni “a feel for the depth of the university’s programs and keeps them connected to the university and to each other.”
And Vlahos sees the Association taking on even more roles, helping to “take alumni through their lives, offering career services, lifelong learning, and preparing them for retirement.”
Vlahos has jumped into his new job feet-first, traveling the campus and meeting assorted Wildcats, from top administrators to brand-new students to long-time alums. He expects to be here a long time.
“My wife, Beth, is a breast cancer survivor,” he says. “We emerged from that with a sense that life is too short. We’re exploring things together. We’re living life. We hope we’re here for a long time. This is a lovely community.”
Back to Fall 2007 contents page
New Alumni Association President and Executive Director Christopher J. Vlahos joins the University’s dynamic new leadership team.
