Higher Ed Icons

Jack Martin came to higher education from politics. Before he ran marketing at the University of Washington, before he built one of the most admired storytelling programs in the field, he worked for Governor Kathleen Sebelius. He ran comms for a congressman. He spent the first decade of his career learning how to move audiences who didn't already agree with him. Then he walked into higher ed and n...

Terry Flannery has been the first person to hold her job three different times. First marketing director at the University of Maryland. First VP of Communication at American University. First-ever EVP and COO at CASE. When the institution offered her the founding marketing role at Maryland with a $48,000 budget, no staff, and a job description that read "coordinate the deans' messages," she turned...

Marketers have been sold the wrong order of operations. Permission, then proof, then scale. That's the sequence most of us were trained on. Devin Purgason argues it's exactly why so many marketers are stuck — and the people actually moving on AI, on student experience, on work that matters, are running it the other way. Proof first. Permission after. Scale once the evidence is in the room. From th...

Ashley Budd saw it before most of the field did. Sitting in admissions at RIT, watching tuition climb and the enrollment cliff inch closer, she made a bet: higher ed was going to have to learn how to fundraise, and the old playbook wasn't going to cut it. She moved to Cornell, joined a brand-new digital innovation team, and got to work. But she didn’t just rewrite the playbook. She changed the gam...

This episode starts with a LinkedIn controversy and quickly turns into a much bigger conversation about what higher ed keeps getting wrong about brand. Mallory and Volt sit down with Joe Master, one of the sharpest brand strategists in the industry, to unpack a line that hits harder the longer you sit with it: higher ed doesn’t have a storytelling problem. It has a personality problem. Because the...

This episode starts with a simple idea: what happens when you pull more threads? In a space defined by templates, sameness, and risk-averse decision-making, Tracey Halvorsen makes the case for something different — a culture built on curiosity, bravery, and exploration. Not curiosity as a buzzword, but as a discipline. A way of working that leads to better ideas, stronger teams, and more distincti...

There are people in higher ed who see what’s coming. And then there’s Michael Stoner — someone who’s been building for it before the rest of us even had language for it. From the earliest days of the web to social media to mobile, Michael didn’t just follow trends. He anticipated them. And more importantly, he made decisions before they were obvious — often when the cost, the risk, and the skeptic...

Higher Ed Icons celebrates the pioneers, thought leaders, trendsetters, and change makers in higher education marketing — the people whose decisions transformed it from a campus afterthought into a strategic function.   Co-hosts Voltaire Santos Miran and Mallory Willsea pull back the curtain on the origin of Higher Ed Icons—from a single text message to a full platform built to document the people...