Why I'm Making a Podcast About the People Who Built This Field

When I was a junior in college, I worked as an intern for Jan Garfield, one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met. She offered me the following advice as I was considering my career: “You should stay in higher education. You need community.” Looking back, I understand much better now what she meant, and I’m grateful that I followed her advice. 

I've spent more than 25 years in higher education marketing. I've designed websites for universities, built a company around helping institutions communicate better, and watched this field evolve from "we need a homepage" to "we need an AI strategy" — sometimes in the same meeting.

Along the way, the thing that has consistently amazed me isn't the technology. It's the people and community that they create. 

Higher ed marketing is a field full of people who share their playbooks. Who pick up the phone for strangers. Who stand up at conferences and tell you what actually worked — and, more importantly, what didn't. But beyond the generosity, there are people in this space who have seen things before the rest of us could even name them. People who built practices, launched platforms, and changed how institutions show up in the world, often years before the market caught up.

Those people are the reason Higher Ed Icons exists.

What the show is

Higher Ed Icons is a podcast I'm co-hosting with Mallory Willsea. The series celebrates the pioneers, thought leaders, trendsetters, and change makers who have shaped higher education marketing over the last two decades. Each episode is a single guest in a substantive conversation — not a rapid-fire tips session, not a panel split five ways. One person, one arc, one story told with the space and time it deserves.

We're talking to the people who fought for the website when it was still treated as a capital project. Who made the case for brand when brand was a dirty word for deans and faculty. Who dragged their institutions into digital — sometimes kicking, sometimes screaming — and changed how all of us do this work.

You know their names. You've heard them speak. You've learned from them. But their full stories — the decisions behind the decisions, the bets that didn't pay off, the moments that changed how they saw the field — haven't been captured. 

Why now

The last 20 years have seen multiple seismic shifts and watershed moments. And now we’re at yet another inflection point in higher education. AI is changing how students discover institutions, how content gets surfaced, and how marketing teams operate. Leaders are being asked — again — to decide what matters and what doesn't. Where to invest, what to let go of, how to make a call before the outcome is clear.

That's not a technology problem. It's a judgment problem. And one of the fastest ways to sharpen judgment is to understand how the people who came before you made decisions when the stakes felt just as uncertain.

That's what these conversations are designed to surface.

Why Mallory

I've known Mallory Willsea for years — first as a colleague, then as a friend, and now as a creative partner. She's one of the sharpest people and brightest stars in higher ed marketing, someone whose instincts about what moves people and what falls flat have shaped how I think about this work.She brings a point of view to every conversation that makes the people around her better. She constantly inspires me to work harder, to learn more, and to take risks. 

When I brought this idea to her, she didn't say "let me think about it." She said yes and had the gameplan and the production workflow mapped before I finished my pitch. That's who she is. I'm grateful for the partnership, and I'm excited about what we're building together.

A word about our sponsor

OnDeck Marketing is our founding sponsor, and their support matters more than the usual sponsor acknowledgment. A brand-new podcast feed has exactly zero subscribers. Backing a show before it has an audience is a real bet — and it reflects something genuine about who they are and what they believe about this field. We're thankful for their commitment.

What comes next

Our teaser is live now. Episode 1 drops April 7th.

I'm not naming our first guest yet. But if you've been in this space long enough, you know him. And the conversation reminded me — in a way I wasn't fully prepared for — why I got into this work in the first place.

Subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so it lands in your feed. Follow Higher Ed Icons on LinkedIn to stay in the loop. And if you think you know who our first guest is, tell me — I want to hear your guess.

This field has been generous to me for a quarter century. Higher Ed Icons is one way to give something back.