He is also the assistant director for Associated Students Administration at UC San Diego where he serves as a higher education leader overseeing a portfolio of student-initiated programs. Evident through his professional affiliations, he is a scholar practitioner who is excited about scholarship and uses research-informed practices in his coaching, teaching, and administrative work. His research focuses on group dynamics, group relations, and leadership development.

This article is an exploration into the purpose of leadership education and leadership learning in higher education. It will simultaneously explore who leadership education is for and investigate privilege, identities, class, and the intersecting impact on access to these programs and content.

The confluence of crises facing our global and local communities have challenged leadership educators to think and practice differently. This has meant shifts in how we teach, how we connect with students, and how we understand our role in making change in our institutions and communities. How can we navigate change personally and as a community? The purpose of this article is to introduce co-inquiry as an emerging method for professional community building, leadership learning, and action-oriented research.

Leadership educators often acknowledge the need to embrace and honor diverse lived experiences and different ways we acquire knowledge and demonstrate leadership. However, do our practices and expectations really reflect this? How do we ensure we are not perpetuating expectations and structures rooted in White supremacist culture? Through our co-inquiry team discussions about the impact of the multitudes of pandemics on the practice and education of leadership (see the previous articles in this issue), it became even clearer that leadership educators must urgently deconstruct whiteness in our personal and professional approaches and practices. Looking at what influence we had and what we could control, we recommitted ourselves to addressing embedded White dominant cultural norms in multiple contexts. The roots of White supremacy in leadership education, development, and training stabilize an ecosystem that includes our classrooms and programs, organizations, and overall field. This article explores the prevalence of dominant norms, their influence in defining who is a leader, and how we can disrupt the cycle of conformity. THE ROOTS AND PREVALENCE OF DOMINANT NORMSThe initial call for a formalized approach to learning leadership started a field dominated by a focus on individual traits, behavior, the business context, hierarchy, and positions (Northouse, 2019). This traditional approach was reinforced by the increasingly prevalent notion that leadership programs helped prepare future employees that would create economic gain. Eventually, Burns (1978) introduced leadership as a process, adding focus to relationships between leaders and followers. However, foundational leadership theories and frameworks largely ignored race and gender, since the research was done using White people as the default norm (Hage, 2012). Without naming identity as differentiators, the leadership research findings are read as declarative and applicable to all people. This ultimately serves to perpetuate dominant group norms like individualism, perfectionism, position, and efficiency, while overlooking many other possible ways of being and leading such as through consensus, relationship, and collectivism.

Events, movements, and tragedies at the local, national, and global levels spark conversations that influence leaders' thinking and behavior. Understanding complexities of contextual factors as they relate to broader conversations and influence thinking and behaviors is a crucial step that can be overlooked. This article explores utilizing critical perspectives and social justice to inform leadership praxis. DISRUPTION IN CONTEXTThe disruption to our daily lives by the COVID-19 pandemic was the final jolt that caught the world's attention, however, the disruption was inevitable. A short list of examples of pervasive challenges and issues that plagued our nation include increasing numbers of unsheltered individuals and families, record-breaking damage from wildfires and hurricanes, growing health care disparities, the widening wealth gap between the "1% and 99%", the #MeToo movement shining a light on sexual harassment and abuse of power by men, and the establishment of the Black Lives Matter movement to generate a renewed focus on police brutality and racial inequity. Contextually, in the United States, these pervasive challenges and issues were intensified by the contentious messaging and intentional acts of disharmony generated by the Trump administration and federal agencies under their purview. When looking beyond US shores, variations of these social, structural, and environmental challenges and issues were also seen at the global level. There was already so much happening before the COVID-19 virus hit US shores!The first article of this issue (see Cummings Steele et al.) used the metaphor of a tsunami to describe how decades of racial, political, health, environmental, and economic issues were accumulating and bubbling under the surface. As a global community, there was awareness of these issues along with disparities of their impact pending the country or region. Many positional leaders, activists, and conscientious citizens would acknowledge the need to address the issues but little would be accomplished. The accumulation of tension, injustice, lack of access, and deterioration created a wave-a force-so powerful that once the COVID-19 virus was present in the environment, there was no going back. Essentially, the bough broke.