Higher Ed Icons: Finally Capturing the Stories Behind This Industry
Voltaire texted me four weeks ago with an idea. His exact words were something like: “Hey, I’ve been thinking about something.”
My brain does not process ideas like a normal person. Most people hear a pitch and think: interesting, let me sit with this. I think: yes, and here’s the website, the guest list, the sponsor deck, and the production workflow.
So here we are.
What we actually built
Higher Ed Icons is a podcast about the people who shaped modern higher education marketing, web, and digital strategy. The pioneers who made the case for brand before institutions were buying it. The ones who saw what the field needed before the field knew how to ask for it. We’re not talking about tools or trends. We’re capturing the thinking behind work that actually moved this industry forward, before it disappears into retirement announcements and LinkedIn retrospectives.
For a field that values research and documentation, higher ed marketing has a real gap.
The decisions that mattered — how the web became essential, how brand earned legitimacy inside the cabinet, how digital teams formed and why they still struggle to scale — that knowledge lives in people’s heads. In old conference slide decks. In stories you had to be in the room to hear.
That’s not durable. And it’s not accessible to the leaders now being asked to navigate another moment of significant change.
Why I moved on this
I’ve spent my career building things in this space: networks, strategies, teams, arguments. The people who did the hardest, most consequential work in this field haven’t really been asked to tell the full story. Conference sessions are 45 minutes. Panels split the clock five ways. That’s not enough room for what these people actually know.
This show is the room.
The moment I didn’t plan for
I got emotional recording our first episode. I didn’t expect that.
When you sit across from someone who fundamentally shaped your career, and this industry, you realize how much of this work is carried through people. Not just what they built, but how they taught others to think. How they modeled what it looks like to lead. How they set a standard for the work that everyone around them absorbed, often without realizing it.
Higher ed marketing is a generous field. That didn’t happen by accident.
Why this matters right now
We are at another inflection point. 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 ignore, how to make a bet before the outcome is obvious.
That’s not a tooling problem. It’s a judgment problem. And one of the fastest ways to sharpen judgment is to understand how the people before you made decisions when the stakes looked just as uncertain. That’s exactly what these conversations surface.
Our founding sponsor
A genuine thank you to OnDeck Marketing and John Reid for being our founding sponsor from day one. A brand new podcast feed starts with exactly zero subscribers. Their bet on what Volt and I are building meant everything — and what they do for institutions, keeping brands present and top of mind for the audiences that matter most, is exactly the kind of foundational work this field doesn’t talk about enough.
What comes next
We’re not naming our first guest yet. But if you’ve been in this space long enough, you know him. And the conversation is exactly the kind of thing that reminds you why you got into this work in the first place.
The teaser is live now. Episode 1 drops April 7th.
Subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so Episode 1 lands in your feed automatically. And if you’ve got a guess on who our first guest is, drop it in the comments on my LinkedIn announcement.
One more thing worth saying before I close. Volt was my boss before he was my friend, and somewhere along the way that flipped and I got the better end of that deal. So much of how I manage people, how I write, how I try to show up for the humans around me traces back to watching him do it first. He taught me that the work matters and the people matter more. When he texted me with this idea, I was honored before I even heard the pitch. Getting to call him my colleague again is a gift. Getting to call him my true friend is better.