Behind the Conversation: Higher Ed Icons Episode #2 with Tracey Halvorsen
I've been in this industry for 30 years, and I've worked alongside a lot of talented people during that time. But I still found myself giggling like a schoolboy at his first Rick Springfield concert through most of this conversation.
Tracey Halvorsen. Boom.
Episode 2 of Higher Ed Icons was a conversation I'd been wanting to have for a long time. When it was over, I sat with my scrawls. Replayed the episode and parsed the transcript. I’m still processing all the ideas and inspirations tumbling through my mind
Pull threads. All of them.
Tracey said something near the end of our conversation that I keep coming back to. "If you feel curious about something and you stop and go, ‘well, but that has nothing to do with my job or my life really. Like I don't have any business pulling on that thread.’ Pull on that thread."
That's not advice about creativity. That's advice about living. It's also, as it turns out, the source of her creative superpower. Her quilt — her word — is rich and diverse because she refuses to limit her curiosity to the work in front of her. She explores new ideas, asks “why” and “what if” constantly, and flexes her bravery on the daily.
The lesson is … freeing. The people doing the most interesting work aren't just working harder. They're living more curiously.
Convention is a starting point. Not a destination.
Higher ed has a sameness problem. I know this. In my lesser moments, I’m afraid I've contributed to it. In the conversation, I copped to it — “homepage bingo” is partly my doing.
But Tracey's approach isn't to reject convention. It's to understand it well enough to move past it. The first Bucknell site worked because there was alignment inside the institution. Someone willing to think differently. To not just produce another higher ed website. The work didn't happen in spite of the institution. It happened because of the right people inside it.
Bold design requires bold institutional leadership. You can't copy Tracey's outputs. You have to cultivate the conditions that made them possible.
The website is still "the place."
There's a conversation happening right now about whether the institutional website is becoming plumbing. Background infrastructure. A data source for AI to pull from rather than a destination anyone actually visits.
Tracey isn't buying it. Neither am I.
Until you can be physically there, the website is where you go to feel what a place feels like. That role hasn't changed. What's changing is the content strategy underneath it. More specific. More responsive to the questions real audiences are actually asking. AI isn't killing the website. It's raising the bar for what a website has to be.
One of my favorite books is Robert Bringhurst’s “The Elements of Typographic Style.”One of his more delicious quotes is, "By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well."
Tracey Halvorsen. Boom.
Listen or Watch Now:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4XwQfbN2QjQu8y2Dwrel2J?si=bc99b13643114eb4
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/higher-ed-icons/id1889996806?i=1000762525514