Tension 1: The LG model renders unnecessary relational connections with communities.  

How universities say they should engage with communities and the expectations of communities with whom universities engage have changed profoundly in the past 25 years. Higher education shared a critical role in movements for increased community participation, local inclusion, participatory research, design and arts methodologies and engagement with system change processes. The academy now seems to understand the need for measurable change in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) inside and outside the academy as urgent. Twenty-five years ago, universities largely celebrated diversity and inclusion – inviting a diversity of people to enjoy what Charles Eisenstein (2020) calls a “banquet of whiteness” without addressing the inequities embedded in what is served, who decides the menu and the seating arrangements.  

Eisenstein and some post-development scholars argue that institutions such as universities need a complete pluriversal rearrangement of the table itself (Escobar, 2018). We need many different communities to do more than sit at the table. They need to join us in picking the food, enjoying its flavor, and learning from engagement with one other. In other words, inclusion must be understood in the context of unearned white privilege and white supremacy as root causes of inequity, injustice, disenfranchisement, and marginalization in the university and across many U.S. institutions. John Muir College Provost K. Wayne Yang (2017), writing under the pseudonym la paperson, calls for the university, in the face of such systemic and ongoing discrimination and rising inequity -- to be decolonialized.