Teresa Valerio Parrot has spent 25 years inside higher education's hardest moments. Not observing them. In them. Some days she's the optimist. Some days, the shield. Some days, the whisperer. And some days, she comes in like a wrecking ball.

Before Jack Martin told stories for a university, he told them for a governor. That instinct followed him to the University of Washington, where it turned a $1,500 ad into 250 million impressions. Here's the thread that connects the two.

Terry Flannery has been the first person to hold her job three different times. When Maryland offered her the founding marketing role with no staff and a $48,000 budget, she turned it down. Then waited for the institution to come back and ask what it would actually take. Terry sits down with Mallory and Volt to talk about building the function before the function exists, the four-step discipline behind WONK, and why the best people in this work stop pretending politics is separate from strategy.

Marketers have been sold the wrong order of operations. Permission, then proof, then scale. Devin Purgason has been running it the other way his entire career — and it shows. This conversation covers agentic AI, student care as a marketing function, and what seminary actually teaches you about making complex ideas land.

Ashley Budd didn't just improve digital advancement — she reinvented it. The giving day model institutions run every year. The argument that fundamentals beat platforms. The insistence that alumni are people, not segments. Those are hers. Most of the field has been running her plays for a decade without knowing it. In this episode, Mallory and Volt finally put that body of work on the record — and ask the harder question underneath it: what does it cost to keep making the right argument when the field keeps going the other way?

Higher ed doesn't have a storytelling problem. It has a personality problem.

That's Joe Master's argument — and it's harder to dismiss than it sounds. In this episode, Joe takes us inside what brand discipline actually requires, from the inside-out work behind Drexel's Ambition Can't Wait campaign to what gets lost the moment a brand strategy hits five siloed teams. We also get into AI, performance marketing, and the question no VP wants to answer in front of their president.

She came to the web as a painter. Not as a developer. Not as a strategist. But as an artist who saw the internet as a new canvas and was eager to find out what it could do. Flexing her bravery and curiosity muscles, Tracey Halvorsen led the creation of a body of work over more than 25 years of work that consistently looked unlike anything else in higher ed. Fastspot's footprint at Yale, Brown, and Bucknell wasn't an accident, and neither is what she's building now at ADEO. In this episode, Mallory and I finally got to ask the question I've been wanting to ask for two decades. How do you keep making fresh work inside an industry that's wired for sameness? 

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. In our debut episode, Volt and Mallory sit down with one of the architects of modern higher ed marketing to ask a deceptively simple question: How do you know what's real — and what's just hype? The answer has everything to do with the AI moment we're living through right now.

Mallory and Volt discuss the inspiration behind the series, as well as their goals for the podcast.