Brian C. Mitchell

Brian Christopher Mitchell (born 1953) is the president and managing principal of Academic Innovators. Prior to founding Academic Innovators, he served as president of Brian Mitchell & Associates, LLC. He was previously the president of Bucknell University, serving from 2004 until 2010. From 1998 through 2004, he served as president of Washington & Jefferson College. He is a nationally recognized expert in higher education, especially on private higher education.

Mitchell has served as chairman of the Pennsylvania Selection Committee for the Rhodes Scholarships and is a past president of the National Association of Independent College and University State Executives. He wrote The Paddy Camps: The Irish of Lowell, 1821–1861, a critically acclaimed book examining those fields.

Washington & Jefferson College

Upon assuming the presidency of Washington and Jefferson College in 1998, Mitchell was thrust into a long-simmering schism between the city of Washington, Pennsylvania and the college. During a courtesy visit to local officials early in his tenure, Mitchell was berated by the officials for 45 minutes, blaming the college "for everything that had gone wrong in the last 50 years.”

In 2000, the college and Franklin & Marshall College, Michigan State University and SUNY Geneseo participated in a collaborative effort sponsored by the Knight Collaborative, a national initiative designed to develop strategies for partnership between colleges and local community revitalization efforts. Shortly thereafter, Washington & Jefferson was awarded a $50,000 grant from the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation to develop a coherent plan, entitled the "Blueprint for Collaboration," to detail goals and benchmarks for the future to help the college and the city work together on economic development, environmental protection, and historic preservation. The plan included provisions for the college to offer more academic opportunities for the community and to explore moving its bookstore into the downtown area, develop student housing in the downtown area, and to expand student use of the downtown eating, shopping, and visiting destinations.

In June 2001, Mitchell and the Washington and Jefferson trustees adopted a new master plan to remodel the campus and its educational environment, building modifications and a campus beautification program.

Edvance Foundation In July 2010, Mitchell partnered with Kurt M. Thiede to establish the Edvance Foundation, a nonprofit organization bringing expertise, resources, ingenuity, and foresight to institutions of higher education across the U.S.

Later career Mitchell serves as the chair of the Board of Trustees of Merrimack College. He is also a member of the board of the National Merit Scholarship Corporation in Chicago and has served as a trustee of Washington and Jefferson College. He co-authored two books on higher education leadership and governance, How to Run a College: A Practical Guide for Trustees, Faculty, Administrators, and Policymakers and Leadership Matters: Confronting the Hard Choices Facing Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018, 2022, and ).

Mitchell was honored with the 2010 national award for individual contributions to American higher education by the Posse Foundation in New York City in May 2010.