Governance Essays examine consequential questions of institutional leadership, responsibility, and public trust. Through analysis and informed perspectives, they explore how institutional commitments shape decisions, organizational practice, and accountability.
About this Essay
Return of the JEDI is a collaborative essay by Tawanna D. Lee and Victor Lee. Building on a conversation initiated by Victor’s original LinkedIn post, the authors draw on their experience in law, governance strategy, higher education, and organizational leadership to examine the responsibilities institutions retain as they reconsider commitments to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. Their analysis considers how leadership decisions, organizational capacity, and accountable governance can sustain those commitments in practice.
Across the country, institutions have reconsidered, restructured, and withdrawn diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives amid changing political and legal conditions. Beginning in January 2025, the Trump administration issued executive orders and pursued enforcement measures targeting DEI programs across the federal government, federal contracting, higher education, and the private sector, including law firms.¹ These developments have brought renewed attention to the commitments institutions made, the responsibilities they retain, and the authority leaders exercise in determining what comes next. Yet the conditions that gave rise to those commitments remain. Questions of fairness, opportunity, representation, and participation continue to shape the experiences of employees, students, and communities. Institutional decisions determine whose perspectives inform organizational priorities, whose contributions are recognized, and what opportunities people have to participate and succeed.
The retreat from DEI therefore presents a consequential test of institutional governance. It reveals how deeply commitments to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion have been integrated into the decisions, responsibilities, and operating conditions of the organizations that profess them. The return of JEDI begins with understanding what this period has revealed about institutional leadership and the responsibilities that remain.
The Responsibility That Remains
Justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion concern the conditions institutions create for the people they serve. They inform how organizations exercise authority, recognize individual contributions, and fulfill responsibilities that extend across their operations.
People bring different experiences, abilities, perspectives, and talents to their organizations. Recognizing that individuality allows institutions to understand the range of contributions their employees and communities can make and the conditions necessary for those contributions to flourish. In turn, leadership carries responsibility for creating environments in which people have meaningful opportunities to participate.
Those responsibilities also have a legal foundation. Federal civil rights laws, including Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, establish protections against discrimination and requirements for equal access across different institutional settings.² Although their application varies by institution and activity, these obligations remain relevant as organizations reconsider their approaches to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. Institutional leaders must therefore distinguish between the discretion to change programs and administrative structures and the continuing responsibility to comply with applicable law.
The development of accessible physical environments illustrates how institutional design can expand those opportunities. Ramps, accessible elevators, and wider entrances allow people with disabilities to navigate spaces that previously limited their participation. These improvements also serve parents with strollers, employees moving equipment, and others whose needs may differ from those initially contemplated. Thus, an institution that removes a barrier expands the ways people can use and contribute to a shared environment.
The same principle applies to organizational policies, processes, and decisions. Institutional arrangements establish the conditions under which people work, learn, participate, and advance. Their design affects the opportunities available to individuals and the capacity of the organization to benefit from their contributions.
Ultimately, these conditions are shaped by leadership decisions about priorities, resources, responsibilities, and institutional practice. Justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion therefore carry implications for the exercise of institutional authority, reaching across the organization and into the decisions through which it fulfills its mission.
What Institutional Retreat Revealed
For years, institutions expressed commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion through strategic plans, organizational initiatives, dedicated responsibilities, and public declarations. These commitments became part of how organizations described their values and their relationships with employees, students, and communities.
In response to political and legal developments, institutional leaders have reconsidered the arrangements through which those commitments were pursued. Some institutions have changed terminology, reassigned responsibilities, or modified programs. Others have discontinued activities previously identified as institutional priorities. Each decision carries implications for the organization’s capacity to fulfill the responsibilities associated with its stated commitments.
The significance of these changes emerges through their effects on institutional governance. An organization may preserve its stated values while altering the authority, resources, and processes necessary to fulfill them. Similarly, a reorganization may redistribute responsibilities across institutional operations, changing how commitments influence decisions and how leadership remains accountable for their implementation.
Consider an institution that establishes an office of values. Leaders consult the office when consequential decisions arise, acknowledge its perspective, and proceed through established decision-making processes. The institution has created a formal mechanism for considering its values, yet the influence of those values ultimately depends on how they inform the decisions that follow.
By comparison, an institution that integrates its values across organizational operations establishes a broader responsibility. Those commitments inform how leaders allocate resources, develop policies, establish priorities, and evaluate performance. Responsibility extends to the people exercising decision-making authority, with accountability for how institutional commitments are carried into practice.
The distinction reveals a central question of institutional governance: whether organizational values have authority within the decisions that determine institutional conduct.
That question becomes especially consequential when political pressure challenges established priorities. An organization’s response determines whether its values continue to influence consequential decisions, whether the capacity to fulfill them remains available, and whether leaders retain responsibility for the conditions their decisions create.
Equity and inclusion provide a revealing test of this relationship. Their realization depends on how institutions allocate authority, develop organizational capacity, incorporate affected perspectives, and translate policy into practice. They also depend on whether people can understand consequential decisions and whether leadership remains answerable for the resulting conditions.
The Governance Test: What Institutional Leaders Must Establish
The retreat from DEI places a consequential decision before institutional leaders: how will the organization preserve the responsibilities it has assumed while determining which governance arrangements are capable of fulfilling them?
Within TL Advisory’s Architecture of Governance™, Equity & Inclusion is a foundational pillar whose effectiveness depends on institutional accountability, organizational capacity, public trust and transparency, and policy-to-practice implementation. The governance test examines whether changes to institutional arrangements preserve the authority, capacity, and accountability necessary to fulfill those responsibilities.
That judgment begins with Perspective, becomes consequential through Practice, and is evaluated through Proof. Each stage requires leadership to establish a distinct governance condition.
Perspective — Establish the Responsibility
Leadership begins by identifying the institutional commitments and obligations at stake, the people affected by the decision, and the conditions that shape their participation.
This requires an understanding of what has changed in the organization’s legal and operating environment, which institutional arrangements remain effective, and where barriers to participation may persist. The perspectives of affected employees, students, and communities also provide essential information about how institutional responsibilities are experienced.
The governance test: Which institutional commitments and obligations remain, whose perspectives are necessary to understand their consequences, and what conditions must leadership account for before authorizing change?
Practice — Align Authority and Capacity
Once institutional responsibilities are established, leaders must determine how they will be carried into practice.
Decision rights, leadership accountability, organizational capacity, and implementation processes must be aligned. This includes identifying who has authority to make consequential decisions, who remains accountable for their effects, what resources and expertise are available, and when decisions require additional review or escalation.
The governance test: Where will decision authority and accountability reside, what resources and processes will support implementation, and which conditions require executive review or escalation?
Proof — Verify Performance and Enable Learning
Institutional commitments require evidence of how governance arrangements perform.
Leaders should be able to trace consequential decisions through the authority exercised, responsibilities assigned, implementation undertaken, and outcomes observed. Evaluation should include whether institutional arrangements support meaningful participation and whether identified barriers are addressed through changes in policy, process, or organizational design.
The governance test: What evidence demonstrates that the revised arrangements are fulfilling institutional responsibilities, and how will findings trigger corrective action or governance redesign?
These inquiries become particularly useful when an institution redistributes responsibilities previously assigned to a dedicated DEI function. Integration across operating units may expand the reach of institutional commitments when decision authority, resources, and accountability are appropriately aligned. Yet the same restructuring may create fragmented responsibility when units operate without clear decision rights, consistent escalation pathways, or executive oversight.
Accordingly, the governing body and executive leadership must determine where responsibility resides, how consequential decisions move through the institution, and whether the resulting arrangements provide a coherent basis for accountability. That judgment requires attention to the effects of institutional change as well as the intentions that motivated it.
The institutional record provides the basis for evaluating those judgments. Decisions about authority, resources, implementation, and oversight reveal what an organization has chosen to sustain and how it has exercised its responsibilities under pressure.
Ultimately, the durability of institutional commitments rests on the capacity of governance arrangements to carry them forward.
The People Institutions Serve
The November 2026 elections renewed attention to the relationship between public authority and the people whose lives are shaped by its exercise. Across federal and state elections, voters participated in determining who would exercise public authority and influence the direction of their communities.³ Elections provide a formal means of holding public officials accountable for decisions made in their name.
That relationship extends into the everyday work of governance. Decisions about infrastructure, public resources, economic development, and community priorities affect people’s opportunities and living conditions. Those consequences create responsibilities for public leaders to explain their judgments, consider affected perspectives, and provide meaningful opportunities for participation.
Transparency, in turn, supports the exercise of those responsibilities. Communities need access to information about decisions that affect them, including the interests considered, the authority exercised, and the obligations undertaken on their behalf. Participation becomes consequential when community perspectives can inform decisions while meaningful choices remain available.
Similarly, institutional leaders face responsibilities to the people affected by their decisions. Employees, students, and other stakeholders experience those effects through the policies, processes, and operating conditions that shape their participation. Their perspectives offer insight into how institutional commitments function in practice and where organizational arrangements create barriers.
Leadership must therefore establish ways for that information to influence institutional judgment. Meaningful participation requires processes through which concerns can be considered, responsibilities assigned, and institutional responses evaluated. It also requires attention to the people whose experiences may be overlooked by established decision-making structures.
Public institutions, private organizations, and nonprofit entities operate through different accountability arrangements. Nevertheless, their governing bodies and executives exercise authority that affects people who may have limited influence over the decisions shaping their opportunities. Responsible governance recognizes those relationships and establishes channels through which institutional leadership can understand and respond to the consequences of its choices.
Public trust develops through the exercise of that responsibility. Institutions demonstrate respect for the people they serve when their perspectives inform consequential decisions and when leaders remain accountable for what follows.
What Comes Next Requires Bold Leadership
The return of JEDI calls for leaders prepared to exercise institutional authority with conviction, judgment, and accountability. The decisions made during this period of political and institutional change have established a record that leaders must examine as they determine how their organizations will fulfill their responsibilities.
Bold leadership includes being unapologetically loud in advocating for employees and communities. It requires a willingness to recognize barriers, defend opportunities, and use the authority entrusted to leadership to advance the conditions in which people can participate and thrive.
In practice, that advocacy gains institutional consequence through decisions about resources, organizational priorities, policies, and processes. Leaders possess instruments of authority that shape access to opportunity and determine how institutions respond to the people they serve. Institutional mechanisms that have been used to suppress participation can be directed toward removing barriers, expanding opportunity, and supporting the contributions of individuals and communities.
The exercise of that authority requires institutional design capable of sustaining the commitments leadership advances. Governing bodies establish expectations and oversee executive performance. Executives allocate resources, assign responsibilities, and authorize the processes through which institutional priorities become operational decisions. Across the organization, leaders must have the capacity and direction necessary to carry those responsibilities into practice.
The governance decision becomes consequential when leadership acts on its findings. Where responsibilities lack clear ownership, leaders must assign accountability. Where authority and resources are misaligned, they must determine what institutional capacity is necessary. Where affected perspectives are absent from decision processes, they must establish meaningful channels for participation. Where implementation falls short, they must authorize corrective action and oversee its results.
Institutional accountability also requires a means of understanding the consequences of those decisions. Commitments to equitable participation should therefore inform how organizations evaluate their policies, examine barriers, and assess whether the conditions they create are consistent with the responsibilities they have assumed.
That work depends on traceability and learning. Institutions must be able to connect consequential decisions to the authority exercised, the responsibilities assigned, the resources committed, and the results observed. The experiences of affected people provide essential evidence of how institutional arrangements function. When that evidence reveals gaps between institutional commitments and organizational practice, leadership must have the authority and processes necessary to respond.
In turn, the relationship between institutional decisions, their consequences, and subsequent corrective action allows organizations to learn from their own performance. It also provides governing bodies and stakeholders with a basis for evaluating whether leadership is fulfilling its responsibilities.
Equity and inclusion are especially consequential within this architecture because they reveal how institutional arrangements affect people’s ability to participate, contribute, and advance. Their integration into governance requires attention to the distribution of authority, the capacity to implement decisions, the transparency of institutional processes, and the accountability of leaders for the conditions their organizations create.
Ultimately, justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion become enduring institutional commitments through the decisions that give them effect. Their integrity is established through the coherence of institutional values, leadership authority, organizational practice, and demonstrable results.
The return of JEDI therefore places responsibility where institutional authority resides. It calls on leaders to use that authority deliberately, to sustain the conditions necessary for meaningful participation, and to remain accountable for the consequences of their decisions.
Justice. Equity. Diversity. Inclusion. More than an initiative. A responsibility.
The conversation is not over. The work is not over. It’s time for the return of JEDI.
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Sources & Citations
1 Exec. Order No. 14151, Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing (Jan. 20, 2025), https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-and-wasteful-government-dei-programs-and-preferencing/; Exec. Order No. 14173, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity, 90 Fed. Reg. 8633 (Jan. 31, 2025), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-01-31/html/2025-02097.htm; Exec. Order No. 14230, Addressing Risks from Perkins Coie LLP (Mar. 6, 2025), https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/addressing-risks-from-perkins-coie-llp/.
2 Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VI, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000d; Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000e-2; Education Amendments of 1972, Title IX, 20 U.S.C. § 1681, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/20/1681; Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, 42 U.S.C. § 12101 et seq., https://www.ada.gov/law-and-regs/ada/; Rehabilitation Act of 1973, § 504, 29 U.S.C. § 794, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/29/794.
3 Associated Press, Calling Control of Congress in the 2026 Midterm Elections (Nov. 5, 2026), https://www.ap.org/the-definitive-source/behind-the-news/calling-control-of-congress-in-the-2026-midterm-elections/; Katy Owens Hubler, 2026 State Legislative Elections: The Results and What They Mean, National Conference of State Legislatures (Nov. 6, 2026), https://www.ncsl.org/state-legislatures-news/details/2026-state-legislative-elections-the-results-and-what-they-mean.
